Beautiful as Yesterday Read online

“But I’ll miss them and our grandson.”

  “I will too. But they can come to see us in China.”

  “That’s true,” the wife says, looking at the baby.

  The husband puts his arm on the wife’s shoulder. “I’ll do the talking. Okay? You’re too soft.”

  They stand and continue walking with the stroller.

  Fenglan determines that it’s also time for her to return to China. She will ask her older daughter to call United Airlines as soon as she gets home. She needs a medical checkup too. She’s been feeling dizzy and nauseated for no particular reason, and now and then she has cold sweats and a racing heart. The heart medicine she has brought with her from China is almost gone. Though her older daughter has bought her a medical insurance plan, she knows the deductible would be high if she chose to see a doctor here. She’s been hiding her discomforts from her two daughters, afraid that they’d insist on taking her to the hospital. Both Mr. Jing and Mrs. You have told her that American doctors always suggest surgery so they’ll get paid more. It is better that she go to her hometown hospital, where she can use her own insurance and where she’s grown acquainted with some of the doctors over the years. None of her discomforts is new, she reasons, and she just needs to keep taking her medicine.

  One thing that pleases her is that her older daughter and her husband seem to be getting along better. She doesn’t know what happened, but they have begun to talk more and do more things together, like cooking, grocery shopping, or fixing the house. Though Bob still often works overtime, when he is home, instead of going straight to his computer, he helps her daughter with housework or plays with Dongdong. A few nights, they left Dongdong with her and went out for a walk. When they came back, she could tell from the expressions on their faces that they’d had a good conversation. Last Friday night, the whole family, including Guo-Ying, went to a theater in San Jose to watch an acrobatic troupe from Beijing. Sitting between Dongdong and her older daughter, Fenglan noticed that Bob and Guo-Mei held hands for a while. After she leaves, she is now convinced that her older daughter’s small family will go back to normal and the couple will be closer.

  Mr. Jing, Mrs. You, and the others have finished the second round of mulan fist and are debating where to play mah-jongg. Fenglan tells them that she’ll skip mah-jongg and go home.

  “Are you going to the anti-Japanese seminar in San Francisco next Sunday? It’s open to the public. It’s organized by the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War,” Mr. Jing says.

  “A seminar?” she asks with surprise; she has never attended a seminar in her life.

  The others explain to her about the seminar, to be held not far from the Japanese consulate in San Francisco, discussing Japan’s atrocities in China and other Asian countries during World War II. “Did you read The Rape of Nanking?” one adds. “It’s by an Asian-American writer. I have a Chinese copy. I can lend it to you.”

  Fenglan waves her hand. “I don’t read books. Reading newspapers is hard enough for my eyes.” Her parents were Nanking massacre survivors, and they had told her and her sister about it. Of course, they spared them the details so she and her sister wouldn’t get scared. Later, through movies, newspapers, TV, and radio, she had learned more about the war, not just the war but also the Chinese government’s protests against Japan’s prime minister frequenting the Shinto shrine to pay his respects to the war criminals. Right before she visited the United States, she saw a group of Japanese tourists in the park near her apartment. They spoke softly to each other and smiled constantly at the passing Chinese. “Japanese devils!” she heard some Chinese cursing. But she couldn’t see any devil in these tourists: they looked so polite and friendly—more so than any of the Chinese in the park.

  Fenglan glances at Mrs. You, who is sitting on a bench, and remembers she once told her that during the Japanese occupation of her hometown, her mother had been forced into prostitution and her two uncles had been enslaved to build an airport and later tortured to death. She has forgotten exactly on which occasion Mrs. You told her that, maybe while they were talking about their parents’ deaths. Fenglan didn’t hide anything from Mrs. You: Mrs. You was her age, she was in China back then, she knew.

  Mrs. You stands. Fenglan imagines that she will say something about her family, but Mrs. You sits again.

  “Mrs. You,” Mr. Jing says with irritable patience. “Are you going to speak out or not at the seminar?”

  “Let me think about it.” Mrs. You’s voice wavers.

  Mr. Jing turns to speak with the rest of the group, saying they should volunteer to distribute the flyers, posting them in all the Chinese supermarkets, like 99 Ranch Market, Marina Food, and Hai Yang. The atmosphere is boisterous, heated by condemnations of Hideki Tojo, the Japanese army, and criticism of the Chinese authorities, who in the view of Mr. Jing and two others, have been too soft in their confrontation with Japan, a compromise to win Japanese investment. Mrs. You sits quietly; she is obviously listening but makes no comment.

  It’s beyond Fenglan’s comprehension that these people, who like to talk about gambling in Las Vegas, real-estate investments, and their children, would discuss a seminar so passionately. It’s as though the women she used to work with in her factory had suddenly switched topics of conversation from baby diapers to world politics. She’s an ordinary person. What do world politics have to do with her? she thinks. Even if Japan apologized, could that change the fact that Mrs. You’s mother, her uncles, and other victims had suffered? How could one settle each of the many injustices of life? As her eyes meet Mrs. You’s, Fenglan knows that’s what she’s thinking too.

  After a while, Fenglan hears Mrs. You’s voice. “I’ll talk about my mother’s and uncles’ stories at the seminar.” She turns to Fenglan as if looking for support. “Are you going?”

  She shakes her head and says that she doesn’t want to go; she realizes that they are different from her. They’re like Americans, eager to express themselves, to have their voices heard, while she prefers silence.

  She excuses herself. From the paved path, she can still hear Mr. Jing’s loud talk about the seminar agenda.

  At the other side of the park, Fenglan notices three people sitting on the grass with their legs crossed under them. Two look like Chinese, and the other is a white man. She stops to look at them curiously, but as soon as she realizes that they are performing Falun Gong she passes them hurriedly. She has seen Falun Gong supporters protesting outside the Chinese embassy in San Francisco, holding big banners and posters filled with pictures of how some practitioners in China had been tortured.

  Two years ago, she followed the example of a neighbor and practiced Falun Gong, thinking that it was just a type of qi gong. But three months later it was pronounced illegal by the government and was prohibited across the country. So she stopped; if the government said it was illegal, it must be wrong, she reasoned. She was surprised when the leader in charge of ideology in her factory came to her apartment and told her that Falun Gong was an antigovernment and antiparty political organization and warned her not to practice anymore. Who had told the leader that she had practiced Falun Gong, she wondered, as the leader informed her that the practitioners had rallied in Beijing without permission from the government. She was scared and baffled, knowing nothing about the rally in Beijing and the claimed antigovernment element in the practice of Falun Gong. In fact, she had always practiced alone and had no contact with any practitioners other than her neighbor, a seventy-five-year-old woman. She promised the leader that she had stopped the practice and wouldn’t do it again.

  After experiencing so much political tumult in her life, Fenglan fears politics; on the other hand, she feels that life is complicated. Who would dream that doing a form of physical exercise could be political? Since then, she has practiced only tai ji, which, she believes, with its long history and popularity, is not political.

  She continues to walk. Rather than going home, she turns onto a small road. She is perspiring
, so she takes off the green fleece jacket her second daughter has bought her, which she wears often for her morning exercises.

  Passing a white church with a huge cross on its roof, she sees a crowd of formally attired people enter, men in suits or tuxedos, women in dresses and high-heeled shoes. Apparently they are there for a wedding. She watches from a distance; she has never seen a church wedding before. After the groom goes inside, it is the turn of the bride, who is with an old man—the bride’s father, she assumes, based on their similar looks. They walk toward the church, where the wedding music begins to play. The bride looks nervous in her beaded and flowing wedding gown, stopping to take a long breath. Her father whispers something to her, and she smiles. They enter the church, the bride putting her hand on her father’s arm; right before they go inside, the bride plants a quick kiss on her father’s cheek.

  Fenglan is moved, recalling a moment thirty years ago: a line of nuns in black habits were standing outside a destroyed church, their heads weighed down by heavy wooden boards hanging from their necks, “I am a poisonous weed” written in black ink on the boards. Behind them were young Red Guards who shouted revolutionary slogans, lifting their fists again and again, while she, along with many other people nearby, were ordered to spit on the nuns and slap them. Convinced that Christianity was spiritual opium, Fenglan felt that these nuns deserved to be condemned and punished. Though she didn’t want to spit on them and slap them, she followed the orders. A year later she was condemned as “a poisonous weed” herself, had to wear a heavy board just like those hanging from the nuns’ necks, and was spat upon and slapped by strangers who stared at her with hatred and contempt in their eyes. As she listened to the roars of accusations against her, she asked herself, Why did these strangers detest her? Then she remembered that when she was spitting on the nuns and slapping them, she had had the same hatred and disdain in her eyes.

  Her older daughter has asked her to go to the church with her a score of times, but Fenglan has always refused. The church is too clean, too quiet, too empty. She imagines that as soon as she steps over the threshold, she will be reminded of what she did to the nuns thirty years ago, then be judged and sentenced.

  But why should she feel responsible for the cruelty she inflicted so long ago? Hadn’t she been a victim herself?

  She remembers that her older daughter once said to her that all human beings have sinned. No, she shakes her head. She hasn’t sinned. She has never done anything deliberately to hurt others.

  She likes the temples back home, which are colorful and always packed with people—you don’t have to be a believer to go there. Incense burns in the burners; vendors sell red candles and paper money; monks chant. And there are so many gods, to each of whom she can pray about different things. No one judges her there.

  The wedding music stops. She keeps walking. Except for the fallen leaves along the curbs, the road is clean, with no garbage in sight. On either side of the road, next to the sidewalk, evenly spaced evergreen trees extend like two walls, and their branches rustle in the breeze. Everything looks cheerful and bright, as if there were no such thing as darkness in the world.

  Fenglan remembers her childhood as bright and cheerful when her parents and sister were still alive. Her father liked to hold her on his lap and tell her stories; her mother was always soft-spoken and gentle, a good cook and housekeeper; and her sister, naughty and smart, often played house with her and took her to see puppet shows and street performers. In the evenings, after dinner, her father would tell her and her sister a story from The Classics of Mountains and Seas or Strange Tales of Liao Zhai, an ancient collection of stories about foxes and ghosts. He sat them both on his lap, and while he was telling his stories, her mother would set out snacks or sweet soups she had made on the small table in front of them, to consume after her father had finished. Fenglan’s favorite story was about Nuwa.

  “Nuwa is Emperor Yan’s youngest daughter. One day, Nuwa went to swim in the East Sea and was drowned by huge waves,” her father had said dramatically, moving his hand in the air to show the motion of the waves. “After she died, she turned into a little bird with red feet and a white beak.” He now flapped his arms, like a bird flying. “She missed her father so much that she cursed the ocean that had taken her life. But the ocean ignored her, rising and ebbing as if nothing had happened. Every day, from dawn to dusk, she circled above the ocean, making the sad sounds of jing…wei, jing…wei, and picked up stones and tree branches from the mountain nearby and threw them into the ocean, wanting to fill it.”

  “You can’t fill an ocean. It’s too big,” Fenglan had responded to her father, her eyes wide.

  “But it doesn’t matter, does it? The most important thing is that Nuwa lived her life bravely,” her father had answered, stroking her head.

  “Ma, is that right?” She had turned to her mother, who was dividing red-bean soup into four small bowls.

  “Your father was right,” her mother had answered, straightening her back. “In the future, no matter how difficult life is, you and your sister must live bravely like Nuwa.”

  At that time, Japan had already established a puppet government in northeastern China, and had bloodily occupied Nanjing, where her parents used to live. They had traveled to Hangzhou, Wuhan, Jiujiang, then finally settled in Nanyi, where Fenglan and her sister had been born. Though they had lived in a small rented house in a run-down neighborhood, her mother had kept the house clean and organized, with her father’s books neatly shelved or stacked, their favorite paintings and calligraphy on the walls.

  Half a century has passed, and now Fenglan is a white-haired old woman, and her parents and her sister are dead. If they knew about her life in the afterlife, she wonders, if they knew that, even though she is alive she has suffered and is merely an ordinary retiree who has achieved nothing in her life, would they feel proud of her? She stops at an intersection, looking around, as if hoping someone will answer her questions. But all she sees are silent roads, silent houses, and silent trees. Heaving a deep sigh, she unwittingly holds her arms in front of her, as though she were pushing away a huge rock from inside her chest.

  Without realizing it, she arrives at Dongdong’s kindergarten. It’s a one-story building with a red roof and blue outside walls. Flowers grow along the walls. Under the awnings are colorful wind chimes made of glass disks shaped like animals. When the wind blows, the animals run in circles, jingling merrily.

  In front of the building is a playground with swings, seesaws, monkey bars, slides, climbing structures, and a sandbox. Fenglan has seen kids playing there many times when she comes to pick up Dongdong. But the playground is empty today—the kids are inside.

  Standing outside, she debates what she should do—go home or wait for recess. In China, she has often seen old people waiting outside a kindergarten’s high fence. Some stand on tiptoe, looking over the fence or through the gaps between the bars, hoping to spot their grandson or granddaughter in the classroom. They usually have brought fruit, snacks, or toys with them, waiting for the break to give them to their grandchildren. Whenever a staff member sees these old people, he or she yells at them, telling them not to disturb the class. They smile apologetically, pretending that they are going to leave. But as soon as the staff member disappears, they turn around and stay.

  Dongdong’s kindergarten has neither a fence nor rude staff members who will ask her to go away. Nor old people with food and toys waiting for their grandchildren. Fenglan suddenly misses her grandson terribly. She paces on the sidewalk before mustering enough courage to walk to a half-open window and peek inside.

  There are more than twenty children in the classroom. The teacher, a round-faced Indian girl, is helping a boy draw a house. Fenglan spots Dongdong in the middle of the room. Lying on his stomach, legs swinging back and forth, he is drawing an animal on a piece of paper with crayons. The animal is a combination of a horse, a dragon, and a bird, with colorful wings, a thick tail, and a long body. After he’s done, h
e stands and holds it up in front of him. He smiles proudly and shows it to a white girl with a ponytail. They both wave their arms up and down, as if flying. After a while, Dongdong says something to her, and they sit on the floor facing each other.

  “You slap my hand once, I slap your hand once, now let’s tell the story about a kid playing with mud.” Fenglan hears Dongdong’s childish voice in Mandarin. She feels her heart skip a beat.

  The little girl must be familiar with the game. She chants with Dongdong and slaps his hand once. Though she cannot speak Mandarin and is merely humming along, she looks serious, staring at Dongdong’s mouth, trying to figure out how he pronounces those foreign sounds.

  “You slap my hand twice, I slap your hand twice, now let’s tell the story about two eagles looking for wizards,” Dongdong continues. Fenglan finds herself chanting silently with him. “You slap my hand thrice, I slap your hand thrice, now we have a story of three monkeys crossing the mountains…”

  As she leaves the kindergarten, she feels relieved, knowing why she is still alive, full of hope. In her imagination, she is standing in her apartment in China right now, surrounded by her parents, her sister, her husband, her two daughters and their families. For the first time, her dim apartment is filled with chatter, laughter, and kids’ cheerful singing.

  “Qiang.” She calls out her husband’s name silently, smiling. “Look! Four generations are finally together.”

  FOURTEEN

  March

  AT A CAFÉ NEAR San Francisco’s Union Square, Ingrid sips an espresso. She looks out the window, watching people burdened with shopping bags. Stores are still giving steep discounts, hoping to dispose of unsold spring stock and prepare for the new summer lines. It is a sunny but chilly Saturday afternoon, following a week of rain; the streets are crammed with tourists holding maps, cameras at the ready. They hesitate at intersections, looking around, sometimes turning to their maps before deciding where to go. San Francisco is a visitors’ town.