Beautiful as Yesterday Read online

  But has it really changed? she asks herself, seeing two middle-aged women bickering at the end of an alley, something she came across almost daily when she lived here. One woman stands on her balcony, the other sits on a stool downstairs. The woman on the balcony leans against the banister, knitting a sweater unhurriedly, while the downstairs woman plucks a dead rooster in a wooden basin filled with water. They curse, throwing words at each other such as bitch, whore, moron, each saying that the other woman’s husband has a mistress somewhere. Then they curse each other’s husbands, parents, children, and ancestors.

  A crowd has gathered to watch them. No one interferes; Ingrid knows that the onlookers actually enjoy the spectacle and urge them on—whenever there is a car accident or a street fight, people gather like this, as if their pleasure lies in seeing others’ misfortunes. Encouraged by the onlookers, the woman on the balcony finally drops the sweater she has been knitting and storms down to the street, while her rival leaps from her stool, hurling the half-naked rooster into the basin. Just when the fight is about to start, a policeman arrives. The cause of the incident, as Ingrid has overheard from people’s discussion, was that one woman’s cat ate the other woman’s fish, put out on the porch to dry. The fish was less than a quarter pound, its value less than one yuan.

  These bored onlookers! Ingrid remembers an article by Lu Xun, a twentieth-century writer she admires, criticizing the apathy of the Chinese people. The city may have changed, but the people haven’t, she says to herself.

  A bearded white man is striding toward her on the sidewalk, a backpack on his back. He’s short and slim, and his face is dusty. A few beggars, all kids, are following him, extending their dirty hands toward him.

  “Mei you le, gei guang le,” the white man stops and says to the beggars in heavily accented Mandarin, pulling both his pants pockets inside out. “Look! No money.” He now speaks English. The beggars giggle and mimic his English but still follow him, hands extended. The people who had been watching the two women now turn their eyes to the man—foreigners are rarely seen in this city—and begin to comment on his physique and speculate about what he’s doing here. The foreigner takes a map from his shirt pocket and studies it. Then he looks around, as if wanting to ask for directions. Discouraged by people’s stares, he looks back at his map.

  Ingrid walks up to him and asks in English if she can help. Learning that he’s looking for a Taoist temple, she asks a woman in the crowd for the directions and then translates them for the foreigner. The temple is nearby—she used to know how to get there, but with all the new streets and houses and road constructions, she no longer knows. Afterward she and the foreigner chat briefly, and he tells her that he’s from South Africa and is taking a year off to tour China and several other Asian countries.

  They bid each other good-bye, and the foreigner leaves. Now the beggars ask Ingrid for money. Ingrid gives them some and they disperse. A young man with a brown suitcase approaches Ingrid. “Can you ask that foreigner if he has American dollars?” he says to her. “I’ll give him a good exchange rate. You can take a cut.”

  Ingrid ignores him and keeps walking.

  The man shoots her a contemptuous stare before turning away. “Who do you think you are? You think you’re somebody just because you can speak English? You’re still a black-haired, yellow-skinned Chinese!” he blurts out.

  Rather than feeling angry, Ingrid finds herself smiling. Isn’t that the truth? She says to herself.

  She walks into an Internet café to check her e-mail—she hasn’t done so since arriving in China. Other than the e-mails about the progress of her translation projects, she has received quite a few personal e-mails. Molly said that a university press had accepted her poetry chapbook with a five-hundred-dollar advance. “Well, it won’t make me rich but at least I’m a published writer,” she wrote. To celebrate her hard-won breakthrough into print, Molly treated all her friends in a Chinese restaurant.

  Angelina asked Ingrid when she was coming back to New York. “There’s this Mexican dude named Hugo Martinez, a mustachioed theater critic, and he’s been asking me to move to Puerto Vallarta with him to run a bed-and-breakfast,” she said. After describing how charming Hugo was and how exciting it was to make love to him, she wrote, “Who knows what God has planned for us? Life is like blind wine tasting: you’ve got to taste the wine to know if it’s any good.”

  Bing’er wrote from Vancouver, where she had enrolled, part-time, in an art school. To pay her tuition, she started to work at a Vietnamese restaurant. “Believe it or not, they made me the chef yesterday. And my first order was fusion-style Ants on the Tree!” She couldn’t travel for a while because of her class, she complained at the end. She didn’t mention Tom.

  There were several e-mails from Matthew, and the latest one told that his boss had read the first three chapters of her novel and was interested. “He may offer a $3,000 advance!!!” He was overjoyed. As for his own writing, he was “so inundated with organizing demonstrations and human rights activities” that he simply didn’t have time for it. He asked Ingrid what she thought about him pursuing a career in public service.

  As Ingrid replies to the e-mails, she hears three people beside her chatting.

  “Do you think a lot of college students died in 1989?” a young man’s voice asks.

  “I don’t know. But the government said a lot of soldiers died. Don’t you remember the photos of ten ‘Soldier Heroes’ who died putting down the riot? I remember one of them was burned to death,” says a girl.

  “It wasn’t a riot.” Another young man chimes in.

  “I was only fourteen at that time. I don’t remember much about it. And I was studying hard for finals. My parents didn’t even allow me to watch TV,” the first man says. “Ling, how about you?”

  “Well, I was twelve,” says the girl after a pause. “But I watched on TV, and it seemed that many people fainted or got ill during the hunger strike in Tiananmen Square and were sent to the hospital. Some refused to leave. Many students wore white headbands saying ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘anticorruption’ in red ink or maybe their own blood. I also remember seeing tanks driving down the streets in Beijing.”

  “Wow, you remember a lot.” The voice reveals admiration.

  “Don’t you envy those people who participated in the protest? I do. They have done something amazing in their lives, you know.” The second young man’s voice is quite loud.

  “Let’s not talk about it here,” the girl whispers, hushing her friend with a gesture. “It’s a sensitive topic.”

  Ingrid glances at them out of the corner of her eye. The girl is looking around furtively, and her paranoia is catching. Ingrid feels her anxiety.

  It suddenly occurs to her that today is June 4. Twelve years ago, on this very date, she witnessed the massacre in Beijing; she, a twenty-year-old, saw her boyfriend, another twenty-year-old, killed by a bullet. “Run! Run for your life!” Sitting in the Internet café, she seems to hear a male voice pounding in her ears. She recalls Tiananmen Square covered with tents, flags, and banners; students’ and activists’ speeches about freedom and human rights; the people who were carried to the hospital on stretchers during a hunger strike. A torrent of emotion grasps her, paralyzes her.

  She sits silently for a while, and after she feels better she leaves. As she looks around, everything is peaceful, even cheerful. Endless streams of pedestrians, bikes, and cars. Huge billboards on top of commercial high-rises. Multilaned streets flanked with foreign-brand boutiques and fast-food restaurants. Passing her, a group of teenagers, with misspelled English words printed on the backs of their T-shirts—such as “Kis me! Make lov to me!” and “Feel fuk good!”—are chatting and laughing. It’s yet another day, without the smallest trace of memory, without the slightest grief.

  Here is her birth country, eager to forget and to march forward without any burdens from the past, thinks Ingrid.

  At noon, she returns to her parents’ apartment after
writing in a café for a while. There, she jotted down the final chapter of her novel in one straight shot, mixing English and Chinese. Half a century after the couple separated, both assuming the other long dead during the wars, and having remarried and borne children with their new spouses, they meet at a common friend’s house. The man is now a widower, a retired bank clerk, but the woman’s husband is still alive, and they have three children, including the one fathered by the man, the painter. Shocked, they avoid each other, and when the man finally gathers enough courage to speak with the woman, he sees her pleading eyes and realizes that all he can do is say good-bye, to the woman, to her husband, and to their three children.

  Now, as Ingrid enters the apartment complex gate, she begins to consider the ending she just wrote primitive, tentative. She debates with herself. The couple has to talk, and they must tell the truth to their common child; if she was him, she’d want to be told. Then she counters that the truth doesn’t do anyone any good. Isn’t it better to keep it buried so everyone can move on?

  Move on, that’s the essence of life, she thinks as she starts up the stairs. Then she hopes that she can at least continue the novel, which, excluding the ending, has only the first three chapters written.

  At this moment she hears a female voice behind her. “Are you Wang Fenglan’s daughter? And your aunt is Wang Fengzhu?”

  Ingrid turns and sees a woman in her late fifties or early sixties standing a few steps away. The woman is thin, of medium height, looking elegant with her short-sleeved green silk top, black knee-length suit skirt, and black leather handbag on her left arm.

  “You know my mother and aunt?” Ingrid asks, surprised.

  The woman removes her sunglasses. “Finally, I found the right place. I’m your mother’s old neighbor. We lived in the same courtyard compound for several years, both before and after the 1949 Liberation. Your mother used to call me Big Sister Zheng, and your aunt was a few months older than I and called me Little Sister Zheng. You can just call me Aunt Zheng.” She sizes Ingrid up. “You look very much like your aunt, especially your eyes; they seem to be able to talk. The moment you entered the gate, I suspected you were Wang Fenglan’s daughter, but I didn’t want to appear rude, so I followed you until I was sure. I haven’t seen your mother and aunt for more than forty years. How are they doing?”

  Ingrid is speechless. Can it be possible that the neighbor her mother had as a little girl is standing in front of her?

  “Is your mother home? Where does your aunt live?” Aunt Zheng can barely contain her excitement.

  “They both passed away. Aunt died in the early sixties, and my mother died last month in the U.S., while she was visiting my sister and me,” Ingrid whispers.

  Aunt Zheng’s smile freezes. She raises her right hand slowly and presses her temple with her fingertips as if she had a headache. After a silence, she says, “Oh, no. I am so sorry. Please forgive me. I didn’t expect that news.”

  Ingrid invites Aunt Zheng to her parents’ apartment. She boils water and makes tea for her according to Chinese custom. Then she tells Aunt Zheng how her mother and aunt died and also how her father died.

  “They left too soon.” Aunt Zheng keeps shaking her head, and a few times wipes tears from her eyes. “How I wanted to catch up with your mother and aunt, and talk about our childhoods in the courtyard compound! When we lived there, there were five families. Though the Civil War had broken out, we lived a relatively peaceful life behind the brick walls. After work, men discussed what was going on with the Communist Party or the Nationalist Party, predicting how soon the war would end. Women didn’t talk about politics. Our mothers would wash rice or vegetables out in the yard, listening to their husbands talk…”

  Ingrid listens attentively, her mouth agape, like that of a kid. She imagines her myopic grandfather delivering a political speech in the courtyard, his hands inserted into the wide sleeves of his blue changpao over his chest, his feet apart, one slightly ahead of the other, and as he talked of something exciting, he gestured like an orchestra conductor.

  She also imagines her grandma making peanut candy, sesame candy, and sticky rice cakes during a Spring Festival. She had a small stone mill to grind beans, rice, corn, and other ingredients. Whenever she used the mill, the kids in the compound would all gather around, listening to fairy tales, and of course, when the food was prepared, each would get a taste. She was particularly fond of Aunt Zheng, treating her like her own daughter.

  “When the Five-Antis Campaign started in 1952,” Aunt Zheng continues, “my father was arrested on charges of bribery, tax evasion, and exploiting workers. He was running a small furniture company at the time. After this incident, most of our neighbors and friends shunned us; some even provided fake evidence to the government, saying my father had hidden a lot of gold and jewelry in our ‘country mansion,’ which didn’t even exist! Your grandparents were the only ones who remained our friends; they actually told people that my father was wronged and would be released soon. Though my father denied all the charges and insisted that he was innocent, he was sent to a labor farm in a different province, and we lost the factory. Without income, my mother decided to take me and my two younger brothers to live with a relative in Henan Province, so she didn’t have to borrow money from your grandparents, who had sold all their valuables to support us.”

  “So, the charges against your father were made when there was no evidence at all?”

  “Evidence didn’t mean much at that time.” Aunt Zheng smiles bitterly.

  “It must have been hard for my mother and aunt to see you leave.”

  “Indeed. With our departure approaching, they cried every day and begged me to stay. I cried with them too, but there was nothing I could do to change my mother’s decision. After we arrived in Henan Province, our relative changed his mind and didn’t want us to stay, so we kept traveling north to try another relative in Changchun. She took us in. As soon as we were settled, my mother wrote your grandparents, but they never wrote back. It was not until a year later that we were told they had both died. We began to write to the people we knew back home about your mother and your aunt, but to no avail. Afterward, there was one political movement after another, and we had to give up looking for them.”

  “Do you know how they died?”

  “Didn’t your mother tell you?”

  “She was vague about it. She said they died of sickness.”

  “Sickness? Hmm, I don’t know.” Aunt Zheng shakes her head slowly. “All I heard was that your grandfather was accused of some kind of crime. Didn’t your parents later get any documents from the government saying that he had been wrongly accused? My father was rehabilitated in the early eighties and received a small monetary reparation.”

  “Even if there were such documents, they never mentioned them to me and my sister.”

  “You might be able to find something about your grandfather in the municipal library archives. Don’t expect too much, though.”

  “I’ll go to the library tomorrow,” Ingrid says, imagining roomfuls of dusty files.

  “I’ll go with you. I know someone there.”

  Aunt Zheng holds up her tea mug, then puts it down without drinking. “In the past ten-odd years, I traveled to Nanyi at least once a year to look for them, but there was no news. Five years ago I managed to get a teaching position at the University of Finance and Economics here and began to spend more time searching for them. I don’t know how many times I visited the government’s human resources bureau. Several times I thought I’d found your mother, only to realize that it was a false alarm. After I retired I joined the senior university to learn calligraphy—by that time I’d almost lost hope of finding your mother and aunt.”

  “Too bad. You were in the same city.”

  “Sometimes the world is small, sometimes it is big. My luck finally came. This morning, I went to a folk art exhibition organized by the university and spotted a paper cutting—a strolling hen followed by three chicks. The artis
t was Wang Fenglan. I can’t tell you how excited I was; I almost fainted. You might find my reaction strange—Wang Fenglan is a common name, and in all the years I was looking for your mother I came across at least fifty people with the same name. But you know, the paper cutting was based on one of your grandmother’s ink-and-brush paintings. I saw her paint it and was told that she was the hen and your mother, your aunt, and I the three chicks. I immediately went to the administrative office and found your mother’s address. I pressed the buzzer, but no one answered the door, so I waited. Then I saw you…” She sighs. “But I was too late.”

  Aunt Zheng begins to sob. Embarrassed to cry in front of a young person, she turns her back to Ingrid, using a tissue Ingrid has handed her to wipe her eyes and cheeks. Ingrid remains silent in her chair, fighting back her own tears.

  Aunt Zheng stops crying. She turns and smiles at Ingrid. “I should feel happy. At least I saw you. Tell me, how was your mother’s life? What was your father like? I want to know everything about them.”

  Ingrid starts to tell her, alternating between her childhood and adult memories. As she talks, she is surprised how she is moved by small, trivial things about her parents and the insignificant events that took place within the family. Aunt Zheng interrupts her frequently, requesting more details. “Tell me more. I want to know,” she says sincerely, as if hearing about her childhood friend will erase the separation from her.

  During a break, Ingrid asks about Aunt Zheng’s family.

  “My father is still alive,” Aunt Zheng says, no longer sad. “He’s very healthy. Just two weeks ago, he went to Anhui Province to climb Huangshan Mountain. My mother is also very healthy, and she practices tai ji fist for two hours every day. They live with my husband and me. We have one son and one daughter, and both teach in college. You must come to see us tomorrow. I can’t tell you how happy they’ll be to see you. My father has kept a photo of him and your grandfather. He cherishes it so much that he doesn’t allow us to touch it.” Aunt Zheng laughs.