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Nainai's Story Turned into a Nightmare

In my memory, Nainai's house is always what it looked like in 1956, when Nainai, her two sons, their wives and children, as well as her daughter, whom I called Third Aunt, lived together in it. In the real world, however, the beauty and elegance of this old Beijing residence was destroyed. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, six families who called themselves “revolutionary masses” moved in without the consent of Nainai or anybody else. They put Nainai, who was then bedridden with diabetes, into a small storage room that had no windows. Not even servants of the family in the old society had lived in this room. For more than five years Nainai lived there by herself. In the end, she died in it alone.

The six families, on the other hand, divided the house up among themselves. Soon they dug out Nainai's tree peonies, leveled Third Aunt's roses, turned the covered corridors into storage rooms, and built makeshift kitchens in the courtyards, using whatever material they could get hold of: concrete, broken bricks, plywood, and felt. The place was so ugly that I did not want to set eyes on it anymore.

Back in 1956 when we first came back from Switzerland, Nainai's house had its ancient beauty intact. In the compound four rows of bungalows, made of gray bricks and wooden pillars, paralleled one another. Along the front of each bungalow there was a rain veranda. The verandas were linked up at both ends by covered corridors, which had wooden pillars, balustrades, and tiled roofs. On the beams were paintings of birds, flowers, and landscapes, the color of which had long since grown faint, while the tops of the balustrades were made shiny by those who sat on them. Beyond the corridors, gray brick walls enclosed the entire compound. In old Beijing many houses were built in this style. People call them siheyuar (yards enclosed on four sides).

In Nainai's siheyuar, the first row of bungalows that had its back against the street was the xiafang (the lower houses). This row was slightly lower than other houses and the windows faced north, which meant the rooms would not get sunshine in the winter, nor much of the cool breeze in the summer. When my great-grandfather and grandfather were alive, I was told, many servants used to live there. Among them were the family's driver, tailor, gardener, and a chef who came from Yangzhou. This chef was the envy of other servants, because he earned one hundred silver dollars a month, a large sum in old Beijing in the twenties.

The fancy food he cooked, however, my father did not like to eat. Father, when he was a college student, preferred to eat wowotou (steamed corn-flour bread) and salted vegetables in the lower houses. From the servants whom he befriended, Father learned what the university did not teach him. He came to know how hard the lives of the working people were in old China and how unfair the society was: the rich lived in luxury and extravagance. The poor worked like horses and oxen from childhood to old age. Yet they could hardly fill their bellies and support their families. When the blood and sweat were wrung out of them at old age, they'd die in the street like cockroaches. . . .

For two years Father ate wowotou in the lower houses and thought about the social injustice he witnessed. Afterwards he decided that mere thoughts were not enough, he ought to put his thoughts into action. So he left home and joined the Eighth Route Army led by the Chinese Communist Party in their fight to drive out the Japanese invaders and to build a new China. In this new China, Father thought, everybody would be equal and all would be free. No more exploitation and oppression. No more masters and servants.

When new China was established in 1949, all the servants in Nainai's house left except two old women. One was Third Aunt's wet nurse. Everybody called her Old Nanny. The other was bought by Nainai's father from the south and came into this family as part of Nainai's dowry. They insisted that they belonged to Nainai and refused to leave. So Nainai let them stay. When I saw them, they were both in their seventies. A lot of white hair, walnut faces, backs bent down, quick tiny feet, which were bound ever since they were five or six. Though no one asked them to work, they were always busy, dusting furniture with chicken feather dusters, sweeping the floor with bare brooms, sprinkling the yard, washing, and picking vegetables . . . Their help was actually much needed, for at that time Nainai hired only one person who would come during the day to do grocery shopping and cook for the entire family.

The 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 the ground. A fishy smell permeated the air.

While this was going on, Nainai's grandfather, an awe-inspiring figure representing the great empire and the law, was in despair. This hateful position was a “favor” bestowed on him by the dowager empress and the emperor. He did not dare refuse it. Thinking it over and over, he could not come up with any feasible solution, except wishing that someday they'd bestow this “favor” on someone else. But on that occasion he could hardly think, because the doomed men and women's eyes were fastened on him. Some were pleading. Others were desperate. Some drowned in tears. Some were spurting fire. Amidst panic and pain, once in a while he would be startled by a pair of eyes that were unusually calm and lucid.

All these eyes were like sharp long needles that poked through his body and soul. Sitting up on high, he did not know how to escape them. He was paralyzed. His heart filled with terror. He knew that people who looked at him with such eyes would never forget him. They would remember him through life and death and three reincarnations. Sooner or later they would come back, seek him out, and make him pay the debt of blood.

Of the many stories Nainai told me about our ancestors, this one somehow sank deepest into my heart. In the sixties when class struggle was emphasized, for a few years I really wished that I had never heard any stories from Nainai so that thought reform would not be such a difficult task for me. In fact, in those years I even wished that I had never had such a Nainai and those ancestors of hers. They were bloodsuckers, parasites, smiling tigers, piles of garbage, cow ghosts, and snake demons ... If I could erase them from my memory, I would become a reliable successor to the revolutionary cause like my schoolmates.

In 1966, just as I was secretly congratulating myself, for I believed that I had finally made a clear break with Nainai and her ancestors, I had a strange dream. It happened soon after the Cultural Revolution began, when I was a Red Guard. By day I was busy writing dazibao (criticism in big characters) and attending thousand-people mass rallies to criticize capitalist-roaders, reactionary academic authorities, foreign spies, and renegades. I was extremely serious about the Cultural Revolution. I believed that through this revolution the Chinese people, led by our great leader Chairman Mao, would wipe out bureaucracy, corruption, and privileges from among government officials. We would build an exemplary society for the entire world.

At night, however, I had no control over my dreams. In one dream there was a mass rally just like the ones I had attended in those days; but instead of the capitalist-roaders and reactionary academic authorities, I was the person the crowd struggled against. Around me, the frenzied revolutionary masses were yelling at the top of their voices. Everybody hated me. I was a tiny boat sinking in a vast raging ocean. I wanted to speak up, to debate with others and defend myself, but no one was willing to listen to me. They were all convinced that I was guilty. So they sentenced me to death. The sentence was to be carried out immediately . . .

Next I was on my way to the execution ground. Somehow my grass-green army uniform and Red Guard's armband disappeared. I was wearing a long white robe, which was the costume worn by innocent convicts in traditional Chinese operas. Around my wrists and ankles, iron chains were dangling and clanging. A bleak autumn wind was rising; my silk robe fluttered and my hairband flew up. People lined the street to watch me, thousands of them. When I looked them in the face, I could not tell whether they were glad or sad. They all seemed to be wearing masks.

As for myself, I remember that in my dream I felt very sick at heart because I was wronged and I had to die so young. But I said to myself: As the sentence could not be changed, I'd better meet my end heroically. There was no point in making a scene and disgracing myself at the last moment. I wanted to keep my memory intact. That much at least I could do.

Then I knew I was dead. My body was lying on the ground, but somehow I still had consciousness. I saw many people walk by my dead body. Perhaps it was a parade. This time they were not wearing masks, so I recognized my classmates, friends, neighbors, and relatives. Nobody stopped to look at me. Not a soft sigh was uttered; not a single tear. They all fixed their eyes on something high and glorious. I wanted to scream at them to attract their attention. But I found that I had lost my voice. It was a soundless world. Eventually they all passed me by and the light began to fade. I knew that I was really dead.