The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir (18 page)

Ironically, Mother, who had constantly been accused by Grandma of sabotaging her burial, was left to take charge. Mother decided that, with Father gone and me away, it would be too difficult to get Grandma all the way back to Henan. We could wait until another time, she told me on the phone. I paused. I began to feel sorry for Grandma. For years, Mother claimed that if she had her way, she would bury or cremate Grandma in Xi’an. She certainly triumphed over Grandma. Being hundreds of miles away from home, I felt powerless to change the arrangement. Nonetheless, I was relieved that Mother honored part of Father’s promise by granting Grandma a proper burial in a plot of land that my brother-in-law had secured in his native village outside the city.

To head off any potential gossip that, given the past acrimony, she had cut corners, Mother delegated her duties to an uncle on Father’s side of the family. A tent went up outside our building. The coffin was retrieved from the warehouse. Friends arrived to help Mother dress Grandma in the outfit that had been made for her fifteen years earlier. A steady stream of people came to pay homage. Mother was asked for token gifts—a piece of Grandma’s quilt or a hairpin—so people could pass on some of her luck and longevity to their children. Two strips of blue cloth from one of Grandma’s old shirts were set aside for my brother and me.

The funeral was deliberately small; the police had been stopping large processions and sending them straight to the crematorium.

At four o’clock in the morning, three vans and a truck arrived amid pouring rain. The coffin was loaded onto the truck. Mourners quietly boarded the vans without the usual wailing and urn-smashing ritual. The little convoy made good time on the empty streets and a policeman uncle asked the drivers to circle the landmark bell tower in the city center to give Grandma one last look at Xi’an, her home for half a century. The journey took less than two hours and the rain stopped as Grandma was laid to rest in a small cemetery near an abandoned brick factory three miles south of the city. My sister recalls that when a relative tried to hammer nails in the coffin, it took him several tries before he could drive them in. “Grandma doesn’t want to leave because her son and favorite grandson are not here to see her off,” he said to everyone.

Father joined Grandma. The urn containing Father’s ashes, retrieved earlier from its niche in the crematorium, was buried separately near the bottom left corner of Grandma’s coffin. Father’s location, at the feet of his mother, meant the son would always be at his mother’s service.

For months I had problems concentrating at school. I felt numb, only dully aware of my surroundings. In senior high school, a friend of mine lost her mother and an elder sister to cancer within six months of each other. I used to visit them every week at the hospital. It was not all altruistic. Misguided teenager that I was, I wanted to wallow in the Shakespearean glamour of her tragedy, and I welcomed the exciting possibilities of reinventing a life without one’s nagging parents. In comparison, I lamented my own life, boring and devoid of any drama—Grandma seemed to live forever and my parents were still in their prime. I didn’t know fate could be so brutal. When death struck my family, I cursed my youthful hubris. The feeling of loss and emptiness was acute and sharp, like the cutting of a kite string, as if my connection with home had simply ceased to exist.

I did not speak to Mother. I did not speak to my siblings. During winter break, I went back to Xi’an and sat in Grandma’s room. It was apparent that Mother had already moved on. Grandma’s clothes, the bamboo basket that she had used to store all my treats, her walking stick, and her chamber pot were all gone. The mattress that I had bought for Grandma was now covered with a brand-new sheet. In fact, Mother cleaned out the room so thoroughly that I could not find a single thing that was distinctively Grandma’s. I was very tempted to vent my displeasure with what Mother had done, but considering it was my first day at home, I suppressed my urge.

Father taught me that the dead never abandon the living; the spirits communicate their wishes through dreams. My atheist Communist upbringing and my education in science made me instinctively reject such beliefs as superstitious, even idiotic. But now I found them soothing. That night, I slept on Grandma’s bed, hoping she might come to me in my dreams and we could talk some more. She didn’t.

The next day, Mother accompanied me on my first visit to Grandma’s tomb, which was in the shape of a small pyramid. We lit some stacks of fake money. “Your grandson is back,” Mother whispered. “Use the money to buy something nice for yourself.”

As smoke spiraled into the gray winter sky, Mother swept the ashes while trying to justify her decision. “I don’t think Grandma would mind being close to her grandchildren. Now that she is close by, we can easily hop on a bus and pay tribute to her during holidays.” Seeing that I didn’t answer, she said, “Oh, well, if you don’t like it, you can still move Grandma back to her hometown after the traditional three-year mourning period.” I wasn’t sure. Like she said, Grandma might be happy here, with Father at her side.

In January of 1990, I spent my first Lunar New Year without Father and Grandma. On New Year’s Day, I suddenly found myself without anything to do. I used to hate going with Father on those visits to uncles and aunties who had promised to help with Grandma’s funeral. Now I wished that Father was here to take me, even though it meant that we had to stay out late and miss the New Year’s concert on TV.

18.

I
NDEPENDENCE

M
other was alone now. My sisters had married. My brother was busy with his girlfriend and I was busy with my studies in Shanghai. As the eldest son, my foremost Confucian obligation was to care for my mother, but I had my career to think about and did not intend to move back to Xi’an, where Mother planned to spend the rest of her life. In addition, following Grandma’s death, I still felt alienated from Mother. I think nothing scared me more than the thought of following Father’s path and having Mother by my side for the rest of her life and even after death. “Don’t worry, I’m not your Grandma,” she reassured me. “I have my pension and I have my friends. I’m not going to be a burden to any of you.” She was a fiercely independent woman, but I still felt guilty, probably because of how disappointed I imagined Father would be after the years he had spent trying to instill in me a sense of filial obligation.

At the end of 1989, thanks to the American professor, I was accepted to a graduate program at a university in Illinois. After camping out in front of the American consulate in Shanghai for a whole night, I received my visa from a journalist-turned-consul, who was thrilled that I intended to pursue journalism in a free country. When it was time to tell Mother about my planned trip to America in February 1990, I didn’t know if she would allow me to leave. But she did.

Barely a year after I arrived in the United States, I received a rushed telephone call from my younger sister. “Mother has a boyfriend,” she said. I could almost hear her calculating the astronomical cost of the call down to the second in those days before the Internet. “It’s Uncle Ma,” she said. “I’ll write more in a letter.” Then she hung up.

Uncle Ma was an apprentice with Father in the early 1950s and, having grown up in the same province, they were “sworn brothers,” but over the years their friendship cooled. He had an important position inside the city government, and Father used to call him a snob and an opportunist. We heard that Uncle Ma had divorced, married again, and lost his new wife to cancer. He came to Father’s funeral and began stopping by now and then to inquire after Grandma’s health, but I was unaware of any interest on Mother’s part because she would try to avoid him during such visits, leaving me to entertain Uncle Ma while she dashed off on some forgotten errand. “A widow could easily become the target of vicious gossip,” she said. I thought she was being “feudalistic.”

My older sister discovered the truth when she went to visit Mother at the hospital after a minor surgery and found her bed empty. The nurse said a man had taken her home. My sister called my brother, who said Mother wasn’t there. She phoned around; someone suggested that she try Uncle Ma. “I’m taking care of her here for a couple of days,” he said, in what my sister remarked was “measured casualness.” There was an uproar among the children of both families.

“Father is turning in his grave,” my older sister said to Mother. “For a person your age, it’s shameless.” That was too much for Mother; tough as she was, she cried. My sister regretted her words but not her opposition to the relationship so soon after Father’s death. Uncle Ma’s children thought Mother was after their father’s money and refused to talk to her, let alone acknowledge her.

Nowadays, the government openly applauds the union of a widow and a widower as practical, and Mother’s moving in with Uncle Ma would cause scarcely a ripple in an increasingly tolerant China. In 1990 it was still scandalous—probably not enough for Mother to be vilified at a Mao-era public denunciation meeting for being a “broken shoe”—a morally loose woman—but it was juicy fodder for neighborhood gossips.

Women face a paradox in China. Chairman Mao said, “Women hold up half the sky.” They worked side by side with men in the factories and fields, and Mao called for the elimination of traditional moral values that contributed to inequality, but Confucianism has deep roots in China and it often was taken to extremes. I remember that a young married couple was caught kissing in a secluded corner of a Xi’an park in the late 1970s. Security guards detained them, charged them with lewd conduct, and notified their companies before releasing them. Change came, but it arrived slowly. In 1983, after China had opened up to the West, a well-known actor was sentenced to four years in prison after neighbors reported that he had attended a private dance party at a friend’s home and had engaged in premarital sex with a young woman. In my faculty at Fudan University, our political counselor was tipped off that a sophomore was sneaking his girlfriend into his dorm when his roommates were out at the movies. The counselor caught them and both students were publicly denounced at our monthly all-student meeting; after graduation, they were assigned jobs in remote locations far from each other.

Things changed fast. By the time I left for the United States in 1990, my brother’s girlfriend frequently stayed overnight at our house and the neighbors found nothing in their lifestyle worth gossiping about. Young people did little that surprised them, but for Mother’s generation, it was as if time had stood still. The neighborhood wasn’t short of widows or widowers, but no one remarried, let alone got divorced.

Apparently Mother and Uncle Ma began seeing each other soon after Father’s death. Mother had started a small grocery store in our building. She craved companionship. Although she was a dutiful member of the neighborhood sewing group that made quilts for brides-to-be, Mother, as a widow, was forbidden to touch bridal gifts for fear of tainting their future luck.

Uncle Ma’s presence was comforting to Mother. My younger sister reported that Mother began to pay attention to her looks and would wear the nice clothes that Uncle Ma had bought her. Unlike Father, Uncle Ma was a good cook. He would come in to help with her business and do household chores. “We both felt that we had done enough for you children,” Mother told me. “We deserve to have our own life.” They began to go out together in public and were soon married without ceremony, living sometimes in his house, sometimes in ours. During holidays, she would stay at Uncle Ma’s house to prepare a feast for his four children, hoping they would gradually change their minds about her. Then, feeling guilty that she had done nothing for her own children, she rushed home to cook for my siblings.

“Nobody has treated me with such tenderness and care,” Mother told me. “He prepares breakfast before I get up and buys me clothes.” Her remarks didn’t shock me. Did she ever love Father, or did Father ever love her? “In my generation, we were not like Westerners and we didn’t say ‘I love you’ every day. We just took care of each other and our family.” It was true, and by that measure, I suppose they loved each other in a Chinese way. However, when I probed further about their relationship, she said, “Your father was a filial son and an attentive parent, but he was a lousy husband, even though he was getting better in the last decade of his life.”

Mother said she had long realized that she would never wrestle Father away from Grandma and found it easier not to fight it in the later years, which is not to say that they didn’t argue when it came to Grandma as well as his meddling in matters of money. Did she ever think of leaving Father in the years when Grandma’s funeral seemed to consume all of his attention? Was she faithful to him? I recall a man whom we referred to as Uncle Wang. At the age of five, I visited Mother at work and noticed that Uncle Wang met up with her every evening. Was he her lover? No. She blushed at the thought. “He was merely a good friend.” During her worst fights with Father, divorce never even crossed her mind.

When I had thought it all through, I was happy for Mother. Uncle Ma was probably her first true love and I supported their marriage. My siblings did not, and said I was too westernized, that I had forgotten what life was like in China. The early days of her second marriage were certainly difficult. The presence of a new man in our house raised many eyebrows. Relatives and neighbors, even Mother’s older sister, measured her against Grandma, who was a virtuous traditional woman in their eyes for remaining a widow all her life. Father’s niece and aunt stopped visiting. Mother said she knew people talked behind her back, but she walked with her head high. “She chose to give up her life for your father. I want to live my own life.”

The strong opposition from my younger brother caused Mother the most distress. Following Father’s death, he was transferred to Father’s company, so all the gossip about Mother and Uncle Ma reached his ears. He felt humiliated. He constantly argued with Mother, accusing her of ruining the family name—this when he had a live-in girlfriend. He began drinking heavily, on at least one occasion making a scene at work. My younger sister was called to come get him and, in his ramblings, he vowed, “I’m kicking her out of my life.” Mother endured all this without comment.

Little by little, relatives accepted her decision and after their initial outrage, my brother and sisters gradually reconciled with Mother. Gossips found other targets. She never got a red certificate, but Mother’s little act of defiance against convention started a small revolution as other widows and widowers began stepping out of their comfort zone and discreetly asking for her advice on dating.

In 1992, Mother received a phone call from her half brother in Henan. Gong-gong had been killed in a traffic accident. She and Aunt Xiuying rushed home to plan their father’s funeral. They also insisted that Po-po, their biological mother, be buried alongside Gong-gong. Mother, who had kept quiet on the issue all her life, became vocal and threatened to take Gong-gong’s body hostage if their request was not met. Their half brothers and sisters consented. Mother and Aunt Xiuying bought a small coffin, which contained a wooden marker with Po-po’s name on it and three sets of
shou-yi
. They burned incense, cried, and wailed to summon the spirit of their mother, whose looks they hardly remembered, so she could reunite with Gong-gong. As the two coffins were lowered into the grave, Aunt Xiuying and Mother felt triumphant. Aunt Xiuying’s face beamed. She said she was at peace, even though she would never know who had murdered Po-po. The burial, with the symbolic reunion, brought closure to her fifty-year quest.

Fate is fickle in all cultures—one week after Mother returned from Gong-gong’s funeral, Uncle Ma was diagnosed with liver cancer. Mother was there for him to the end, as she had been for Father.

Mother was alone again. The neighborhood called her
kefu
, or “husband killer.” Though the family rallied around her, her own health suffered during the emotional turmoil, but I was not prepared for the phone call from my brother-in-law saying I had to come home. I was living in Chicago and had just started my first job. It was a week before the Lunar New Year. He said Mother had an allergic reaction to some medicine she had taken for a cold and had suffered massive internal bleeding. I cursed my misfortune and managed to find a flight, arriving at the hospital, dragging my suitcase behind me. Mother seemed surprised. She was quite lucid and in relatively good spirits despite her surroundings. Her cheeks looked sunken and her former radiance was gone. She sat up and hugged me. I talked to her doctor, who said that while they had the bleeding under control, the prognosis wasn’t good; his diagnosis was late-stage liver cancer, the same cancer that had killed her second husband. She didn’t look like she was dying and I had her transferred to a bigger teaching hospital for a second opinion. “I’m ready to go. I’m going to fight this cancer,” she told me. “When I get out of the hospital, I will start all over.” I teased her. “If you find another husband, make sure he goes through a medical exam first so he doesn’t die on you too fast.” Mother was unaware that her relatives had started preparing her
shou-yi
, which was somewhat premature because the cancer was operable and she made a complete recovery. When I phoned a year later, my younger sister told me, “Mother is gone.”

“What? When did she die?” I felt faint, my fingers went icy cold.

“No! No! She’s married again and has moved into her new husband’s house on Western Street,” my sister said, and we laughed, nervously at first, at my misunderstanding. According to my sister, Mother and several widows in the neighborhood had registered for a new seniors’ dating service set up by the government, which was concerned that, with the disappearance of big families in China, many widows and widowers were living alone without proper care. A nationwide campaign was launched to encourage old people to start a new family and, as a member of the street committee and having remarried, Mother took the lead, which is how she came to meet Uncle Shen, a retired accountant from Shanghai ten years’ her senior.

At Qingming, Mother and my siblings carefully maintained the graves of Father and Grandma. For the tenth year of Grandma’s death, Mother burned a wardrobe of colorful paper clothing, television sets, a car, and a refrigerator—an expensive offering. Mother always seemed to trip and fall now when she visited the cemetery, scratching her elbows or legs. “That old lady,” Mother said. “She hated me when she was alive and she still won’t forgive me now that she’s in the other world.” My younger sister said privately, “Grandma is probably cursing her for remarrying so fast.”

Mother visited me twice in the United States, telling my siblings that she wanted to reconnect with me emotionally. Growing up, I had never heard Mother say how much she missed me or loved me. Age had softened her. One day, I came back from a three-day trip and found her waiting for me at the door, just like Grandma did when I was little. When I asked how she was, she replied, “The food had no taste without your being here.” I cringed at her endearing remarks but, little by little, I came to accept her love. Time had also allowed me to become more detached from my feelings for Grandma and I could be more objective and understanding of Mother. We grew closer, and as an expression of love, she cooked, serving up her delicious dumplings and winning the adoration of my American friends. Upon her return to China, I called her weekly, giving her updates on my life and hearing her latest gossip about our old neighbors and occasional complaints about my siblings.