Читать книгу A Time of Ghosts - Hok-Pang Tang - Страница 5

As a child I was a spoiled, arrogant little despot. I knew I was born to wealth and power and took full advantage of the fact. Servants tended all my needs. They bathed me, clothed me, and one even pre-chewed my food so that it would be easy on my young digestive system. I disliked being awakened from my nap, and any servant unlucky enough to have this task met the full force of my wrath. I broke a considerable amount of china by throwing it at the heads of offenders who were then scolded for not watching me.

In any contest I always had to win or I became very angry. One day a friend of my father brought his son over to play a game with me. The little boy managed to beat me. I was furious, and made a tremendous fuss. The other child was not used to such behavior and became angry. His father came hurrying to see what was the matter. When he found how things stood he scolded his son severely. “What are you doing!” he shouted at the boy. “Who do you think you are? His position is different than yours. He can do whatever he wants! But not you!”

I found through many such experiences that position and power made me different from everyone else. I was not subject to the same rules. And though at first I had some pangs of conscience about it, I soon surmised that I had the right to hurt others, whether with words or thrown scissors. I was superior to them, and never in the wrong. Where did I learn all this? From my dear old two-faced granny.

My grandmother was a typical old-fashioned Chinese woman of the upper class. To this day I cannot see one of those colorful, formal portraits known as “ancestor paintings” without thinking of her. She had very tiny feet, and every now and then the long foot-binding cloths had to be removed. Because she had her feet washed only occasionally, this event always brought to mind the Chinese saying that a boring story is like one’s grandmother’s foot-binding cloths – long and smelly.

She treated the servants very poorly, beating them when they displeased her. And though ill servants were given money for medical treatment, if it appeared they were dying, they were sent home. It would have been inauspicious for a servant to die in our house.

Grandmother was an extreme misogynist. In her eyes women were somehow inherently evil, and she held the attitude – common to most Chinese – that whenever any past emperor became corrupt or acted in a manner leading to the downfall of the country, the cause was certainly to be found in a woman.

She and my father had a great falling-out over a teenage servant who had become pregnant. It turned out the girl and been raped by my grandfather’s adopted son, the son of my elegant aunt. Grandmother insisted on sending the overwrought girl back to her family, but my father protested strongly, saying that the family was poor, unable to keep her, and that is why she was given to us in the first place. Grandma was implacable. It would not do to have a servant giving birth to a child of a son of the mansion! Think of the tremendous loss of face! And what effect would such a thing have on Grandmother’s hopes for a very high marriage for her son? Unthinkable!

So against my father’s wishes the pregnant girl was sent home. Later we heard that her ignorant relatives were so shocked by her unwed pregnancy that they put her into a bamboo pig cage, weighted it with a heavy boulder, and drowned her in the lake.

Mornings were particularly awful for the servants and for my father. Grandfather – the old general – had long since died, and Granny had acquired the unappealing custom of greeting each dawn with a lengthy litany of curses for all those not in favor. “If you eat, may a bone stick in your throat! If you walk under a bridge, may it fall on you! May your soup contain poison!” These screeched imprecations were to her what morning prayers were to others.

She never worked a day in her life. She never cooked even one meal. All her privileges she considered rights, because she had the good luck, as she never tired of saying, to be born a daughter of the Manchus.

Apparently the local Buddhist monks were completely fooled by her. She always wore her best face for them, and because of her many donations to the monastery they called her a “living Buddha.” She was indeed religious in a way, but her religion seemed based on paying her way into a better afterlife without having to go to all the ethical bother.

She made something of a show of denying herself meat on the first and the fifteenth day of each month, and made much of her decision to eat only one bowl of food a day so that the poor and ill might have the rest. Typically, however, she cheated – and began eating from an enormous bowl. Her innate generosity was limited to giving servants who pleased her a little money, or perhaps some cloth for their sewing, while those who displeased were struck in the face with her bamboo pipe.

This attitude became reflected in me. I felt quite correct in kicking or striking servants who angered me, yet if one asked a favor I would take the humble petition to my grandmother, who was willing to give me practically anything I wanted. I saw little of my mother and father at that time, and was really raised by the servants. Yet because of my ambivalent position in their lives, I do not know to this day whether they loved or hated me. Perhaps even they did not know.

While Granny provided my non-academic education, the time came for me to attend school. I was four or five, and already had been put to the customary test to see what my propensities might be. My father had formally placed three objects before me and told me to choose the one that attracted me most. The first was a writing brush and inkstand. If I chose it, I might become a scholar, the most highly respected of vocations in China. The second was a sword. If I chose that, perhaps I might grow to be a great and formidable general – power always commanded respect. The third was an assortment of women’s cosmetics. That would have been a most unfortunate choice, indicating not much could be expected from me beyond a life of idleness. My father waited in expectant silence as I looked intently at the three choices. Then I proclaimed my decision loudly. “I want a woman’s thigh!”

My father was aghast and furious, but it seemed a sensible choice to me. Rather than exhibiting a precocious sexuality, my choice was made because whenever I went to sleep, it was always on the comfortable thigh of a female servant, never on a pillow. The human utilitarian object had to sit there quietly until I was deep in slumber – then she could gently remove herself and go about her business.

In spite of my poor showing in choosing a career, I was enrolled in what was considered a “Western” school, meaning it was run along European or American rather than traditional Chinese lines. One of the few visible evidences of Westernization was the costume of the female staff – bleak, light-blue uniform dresses.

As for the curriculum, in my case it consisted of singing, learning to count, and beginning to write by brushing black ink characters over pale red examples printed on cheap paper. One can get some idea of just how “Western” the school was by the first Chinese words I was taught to write: “The superior man Confucius had three thousand disciples. Of these, only seventy became gentlemen.”

I must add in fairness that I did learn some incidents in the life of Abraham Lincoln, as well as the moral tale of the youthful George Washington cutting down the cherry tree, which many years later I discovered to be untrue.

School was not bad. When I had homework I ordered my cousins to do it for me, which, being inferior, they were obliged to do. I admonished them to carefully toss in a few minor mistakes to make “my” work more convincing. I had the teachers in the palm of my hand because my father was an important and wealthy judge. No one wanted to risk his disfavor by disciplining his son.

I did not even have to bother with the walk to school if I felt lazy. A fifteen-year-old pouty-lipped servant girl inappropriately named “Happiness” was given the responsibility of getting me there – and often that meant carrying me on her back. Once at school, Happiness had to wait outside in the playground under a starfruit tree all day until classes ended. Then she had to take me back home. I was particularly insistent that while waiting, she had to stay within sight of my classroom window. If her bored young face ever disappeared from that frame I would throw a tremendous tantrum until she was back at her accustomed place beneath the tree.

Life must have been an incredibly dull trial for Happiness, but she did find one small pleasure in all this. When it rained, preventing me from going home to eat, another servant came to relieve her while she ran home to get my lunch. It was fetched back to me in a container consisting of tier on tier of enamel food trays, all kept nicely warm by hot coals in the base pan. I was not averse to sharing some of my lunch with Happiness, and she soon developed a real concern for the weather. Whenever it looked like the next day might bring rain, Happiness suggested that it might be good for me to eat certain kinds of food that, I noticed, as a servant she could never expect to get on her own. Following her sage advice, I would then give my order for the next day’s lunch directly to the cook, who would not have paid the least attention to any request from Happiness. If rain did appear the following day, Happiness managed to get a tiny amount of what her name signified by mooching tasty bits from my lunch. I was not fooled. I knew what she was up to, but was for some reason her willing accomplice.

One day when class ended and I ran out into the playground, Happiness was inexplicably nowhere to be seen. As I stood there in confusion, two men came up to me. One was well-dressed in Western clothing. The other appeared to be his servant. They greeted me like long-lost relatives. “Hello! How are you! It is good to see you!”

I had never seen either of them before, and did not know what to make of it all. Where was Happiness? The strangers smiled at me, their eyes gleaming expectantly. “We are friends of your father from Hong Kong,” they said. “We have come to give you a gift!”

What is it?” I asked suspiciously.

“A gun! A gun that really shoots!”

At that news I lost some of my caution. I had wanted a gun for a long time. I had seen them in cowboy movies from America, and though my parents had given in to my wheedling and bought me some expensive imported cowboy-style boots and pants, they had refused me the one object that really made a cowboy a cowboy – a gun.

I was becoming rather excited. “Where is it?” I asked, looking about and seeing nothing.

“Oh, it isn’t far away. Just come with us and we will get it for you.”

That aroused my suspicion again. “Why didn’t you just deliver it to my house?”

“Oh, no time, no time!” they replied, smiling. “We are in a hurry to catch our train back to Hong Kong, and we did not want to leave without giving you your gift, so we stopped here on our way – but we need to hurry.”

Two forces struggled within me. On the one hand their story seemed rather peculiar and did not make a lot of sense. On the other I really wanted a gun, and how could they have known that if they were not friends of my father? As I stood hesitating, they moved in on both sides of me and took my arms. “We really must hurry now!” they said.

Well, they had me. But I really wanted that gun! So I allowed myself to be hustled out of the schoolyard.

When we got about a block from the school, the one who seemed the servant threw a blanket over my head and pulled it tight. I felt myself being picked up and carried. The cloth was pressing against my nose and mouth, and I could barely breathe. Not long after, I was put down, and felt the long, easy glide and bump of a rickshaw beneath me. As I struggled for breath, it seemed that the suffocation and darkness went on forever.

Finally the blanket was pulled off and I could breath again. I found we were near a barn in the center of a grassy field. At that point I was really befuddled, but children never really know what adults are about anyway, so I still half-believed that these men had something for me. They told me it was in the barn, and took me inside. Then we went down through a trap door into a kind of basement with small, high windows. The light was dim.

I soon realized that I was in a difficult situation. There was no gun. If there was no gun, then these men were most likely not friends of my father, and that meant serious trouble.

They told me to stay in the basement, and went up through the trap door, closing and fastening it tightly behind them. Not knowing what to do, I waited there in the dim shadows for a long, long time. The two did not return. I could hear no sound indicating their presence on the floor above.

Looking about, I found a small digging tool and threw it at a high window as hard as I could. There was the sound of breaking glass, but no human noises inside or out. I took a long, bamboo pole – probably the handle of some farming implement – and leaned it against the wall below the broken window. Then, grasping it tightly with my hands and knees, I climbed up toward the failing light. The pole was just long enough, and when I reached the narrow window ledge I pulled out the remaining teeth of broken glass from the frame and squeezed out through it to freedom.

The evening sun had gone down. I walked across the wide fields through gathering darkness. After some time I came to a small village. I was leery of speaking to anyone there, not knowing what to expect of these strange country people after what had happened. But soon I remembered that in most of the stories I had heard, it was always the old people who were kind – so when I happened on an old man, I asked him the way to my house.

“Oh, what are you doing so far from home?” he said. I did not tell him how I came to be lost so far in the countryside, but he was nonetheless kind, and ordered his young daughter to get a lantern and take me home. We walked and walked through the night, and finally I began to recognize my surroundings. I told her that my house was nearby, and she, wanting to get back to her distant village, left me to walk the rest of the way by myself.

My parents were both ecstatic and very angry. They had been searching everywhere for me, and no one had any idea what had become of me. When I told the story of my kidnapping, my father was at first scornful. “How could you be so stupid!” he said. “You let your desire for a gun overcome your good sense!” But when I told him the story of how I had escaped by breaking a window, he praised me for my cleverness.

I was, after all, back home safe. We often wondered how my captors had known about my interest in guns, and how they knew also about my family’s connections with Hong Kong. Many years later the mystery was solved when a minor criminal appearing in my father’s court hoped to alleviate his punishment with a confession. He was one of the men who kidnapped me. The plot had been hatched by my uncle, my grandfather’s adopted son. He thought that by conspiring with his shady friends he could easily get a ransom from my family, a great sum that would keep him in gambling money for a long time.

My uncle had a great weakness for gambling. In my childhood he was frequently the reason for the disappearance of certain of Grandmother’s jewels and of money. Whenever the old lady could not find one or the other she was certain to blame the disappearance on this or that servant. The unfortunate suspect was then beaten and tortured to force out the inevitable false confession.

An incident occurred that drastically changed my grandmother’s reluctant liking for my father. Once again jewels were missing, and once again the house was in an uproar with Granny raging shrilly at the servants. But this time the end was to be different. My father had put a “tail” on my uncle, and when discretely followed, he was found selling the stolen objects in a pawnshop. When my father relayed this information to Granny she was livid. She screeched at him and accused him of being more interested in servants than the family. Why – so her son was seen pawning the jewels? So what! It was no doubt those wicked servants who had put him up to it!

There was no reasoning with her. Instead of seeing her prodigal adopted son in his true light, she became inflamed with a fierce hatred for my father that lasted to the end of her days.

I must admit that though I liked my father, I had little respect for him. I thought him weak and rather stupid. That was because he was always being terrorized by my grandmother, who seemed to hold the upper hand in all situations. Granny knew how to take advantage of her state in life, but Father did not. Instead of lording it over the servants and punishing them soundly when they did not please, he treated them with gentle kindness.

My father often went to restaurants two or three times a day. There he both took his meals and carried on business. He liked to take me with him to show off his son. It took us a long time to arrive, because whenever he saw someone he knew on the way, he would stop the rickshaw and chat. Then we would again proceed on our way until he encountered another acquaintance and stopped for more conversation.

The lengthy trips to eating places were worth it. I found the one we frequented mornings both exciting and absorbing, and I enjoyed the atmosphere even more than the food. It was very noisy. The chatter of patrons mingled with the creaking of ceiling fans that did little to disperse the clouds of smoke from cigarettes and pipes. Through the haze moved young waitresses dressed in the then fashionable chi-pao, a long, tightly-fitted gown with a high neck and a slit up the leg. They knew me well, and on my arrival I would usually pick a particularly pretty one and sit on her lap. I enjoyed calling her “mother,” which seemed to throw her into amused consternation because it was considered an insult, implying that she had slept with my father.

The charming waitresses flirted unashamedly with single men and even with married men who happened to be unaccompanied by their wives. Here my father was nicknamed “Restaurant Fly” because he was always flitting from table to table to talk with friends or business acquaintances. His waitress had to follow after him bearing his teacup as he moved constantly about the place.

I was the center of interest – praised and fussed over by waitresses, complimented and flattered by my father’s friends. There was only one aspect of the establishment that disgusted me. It was abundantly equipped with brass spittoons, and looking inside one of those was enough to make me lose my appetite. They were the targets for various old men who would often attempt a hit from four or five feet away, and would, to my fastidious displeasure, frequently miss. But even this defect was made up for by the caged birds hanging everywhere. They were placed there temporarily by customers who had taken the birds out for fresh air and liked to stop on their way for a cup of tea and a chat with their cronies.

At lunchtime, my mid-day school break, I was often taken to a lovely and far more elegant place called the “Western Garden.” The sides of the restaurant were open to the outdoors – a lovely landscape of rocks rising like hills, cooling fountains, and a serene fishpond. That was my father’s place of choice for relaxation, and he usually limited his contacts there to personal friends.

I recall one of those companions appearing suddenly in a state of excitement. He had acquired a rather remarkable Western teapot, and was anxious to show off his find. I watched closely as he lifted off the lid and told my father to peer inside. “What do you see?” he asked.

“Nothing,” my father replied, wondering what the point of all this was.

Then the proud owner of the teapot called for cool water. With a great show he poured it into the teapot and replaced the lid. Then he handed it to my father again.

“Try now,” he said.

My father took the lid off and once more peeked inside. His friend smiled in anticipation. Suddenly my father burst into laughter, and his friend could not help but join him.

I wondered what it was all about. “Let me see!” I demanded, but they would not. I was used to having my way, however, and when their laughter subsided and their conversation drifted deeply into other topics, I surreptitiously lifted the teapot off the table and peeked inside. There I saw the nude body of a woman, its form inexplicably revealed by the cool water, without which the inside of the pot was simply blank.

As in that instance, I always got the best of my father, which lessened my respect for him even more – so much that I would frequently argue with him, which was considered very unfilial. He just put up with it. He was a firm believer in the I Ching, and seemed determined to accept his fate rather than struggle against it. Consequently he did not force me to do anything that did not appeal to me. The only thing upon which he insisted was that I attend school.

His attitude troubled me. Though I felt superior to him, his actions raised doubts in my mind about my beliefs concerning the world and my relation to it. He frequently posed odd and disturbing questions: “When you go to hire a rickshaw,” he once asked, “would you hire an old rickshaw puller or a young rickshaw man?” He then proceeded to detail the problem: “If you hire the old man he will be out of breath going uphill. He will be slow. You will be angry with him, or perhaps pity him, and so you will want to hire the strong young man instead. But if you do not hire the old man, how can he live?”

He was always raising such questions that demanded an answer, yet the answer was frequently not entirely satisfying. In many cases it seemed that no matter what one’s decision, the outcome was both good and bad. In that way, slowly and subtly, my father planted seeds in my mind by example and through his odd questions that seemed designed to erode my self-satisfied view of my position in the world and my belief that all things must somehow work constantly for my gratification.

At that time I first began to notice foreigners. They were hard to miss, because whenever one appeared in the streets he was accompanied by a crowd of some thirty curious onlookers anxious to see first-hand how a “foreign ghost” appeared and behaved. So every passing American or European seemed to me like a sort of traveling magic show. Our attitude toward Westerners was one of mixed amazement, scorn, and admiration.

I knew, of course, that they saw everything much differently than we. That was because they had green eyes, not the normal black. And they had “eagle” noses and curly hair, both, according to fortune-telling by facial features, signs that they were hard to deal with. That was obvious to anyone, because foreigners were not even subject to Chinese law. If a Western sailor raped or stole he was just returned to his ship, and sailed happily away!

We also suspected that Westerners had not quite made it to the status of real humans – they tended to be hairy, some had an odd smell, and they possessed the astonishing habit of eating meat that was still bloody and vegetables that were raw – as though they had either not discovered cooking or were not yet civilized enough to take full advantage of it! They seemed to have no genuine emotions, but would send their children off at about the age of eighteen to make their own way in the world, instead of continuing to care for them at home as a loving family would do.

Western women were nonetheless admired for their pale complexions. In China only females of the highest class, who always shielded their bodies from sun and wind, could have such skin – and yet these odd Westerners were born with it! My mother was quite taken with the physical build of Western men. They walked with their chests out and shoulders back, stood straight and strong, and had big noses, which in China meant good fortune. We admired their discoveries and inventions, but could not fathom their haphazard attitude toward social relationships. Even stranger, it seemed they did everything the opposite from us. In a contest they would list the losers – number three, number two – before the winner!

I felt a strange kinship with them. I loved Western movies, and my family nicknamed me “Foreign Ghost Son,” because I seemed just as unreasonable and mystifying in my thoughts and actions as Westerners.

In spite of the occasional passing spectacle of a Caucasian, my life was lived as though within an enclosed garden. Protected and sheltered to a great extent from the realities of life, I thought that suffering and hunger were things that happened only to others born to a lesser station, those outside the fortunate domain of my grandfather’s house. I was supremely self-confident and self-satisfied. Who could challenge me? My only possible threat was from my father, who posed his peculiar questions and sometimes decided to punish me when my actions exceeded even his wide boundaries. But when threatened with punishment I had only to scream for Granny, and she would come ranting and fuming like a vengeful demon. “Who dares to strike my grandson?” she would scream – and my father would fall before her intimidating authority like a mud wall before a flood.

The great events of the world outside our walls had small effect on my protected world. The coming of the Japanese meant little more to me than some added excitement. While the citizens of Canton were being herded into caves in the nearby hills during bombing raids, our family was kept together at home by my grandmother, who simply refused to go. Many of those who went died horribly when the supposed shelter of the caves collapsed. But we felt safe and secure. As the bombs fell on Canton we were all before our household altar, following Granny as she prayed to the Compassionate One Who Hears the Cries of the World. “Save from bitterness, save from disaster, Bodhisattva Kuan Yin!” And though explosions destroyed houses near us, ours was never touched.

And so the turmoil and tragedy of the Japanese invasion and the following Second World War disturbed me no more than dark clouds passing far overhead. Then, at the joyous New Year Celebration that marked the coming of the year 1948 to our house, a maid was carrying in our rice-filled bowls from the kitchen. She had stacked them high, one upon the other, for convenience. When she reached the dining room, they slipped and fell to the floor, shattering and scattering rice everywhere.

My grandmother, in mixed horror and anger, raved at the servant. “What have you done! What have you done! You have ruined our luck! This will be a year of bad fortune! Bad fortune!” My mother tried to calm her, to point out that it was just an accident, but Granny was not mollified.

The celebration had been spoiled for her, and as the rest of us continued with food and laughter, I saw that from time to time she would look down, shake her head from side to side, and mutter blackly to herself, “Bad fortune! Bad fortune!”