The Year She Left Us (28 page)

“This is not it,” I said. We faced a hillside covered in multistory buildings jammed close together. The occupied buildings were windowed concrete; washing hung from balconies; thick cables looped and roped, and tin awnings jutted from lower floors. Other buildings were halfway complete with bamboo scaffolding tic-tac-toed up and over or covered in plastic sheeting striped in red, white, and blue. On the street in front of us, a crowded bus lumbered. Peddlers hawked greens in leafy bundles. It could have been any hillside in any city; surely it wasn't mine.

But this was my hillside, the driver said, where I had directed him to take me. I insisted he had bungled my directions, turned off too early, couldn't read a map. He didn't get angry—arguing, like staring, wasn't a personal matter—but stubbornly held his ground, telling me over and over that if we were lost, it was because he'd been supplied with inaccurate information. I had him drive us up and down the streets, looking for signs that might point us toward the cemetery. The roads weaved in and out. Nothing looked familiar. It occurred to me that he was trying to cheat me. Perspiration beaded on my face and dampened the back of my neck where my silk blouse wilted. I needed a bathroom but was afraid to get out of the car. What if he drove off with all the things I had so carefully collected? I couldn't lug the bag into the toilet with me. I tried to hold myself shut, but cramps seized me.

“Auntie,” the driver said. He guessed at my distress and felt sorry for me. He helped me out and guided me to a place—guesthouse, dormitory; I couldn't tell what it was—where a white-haired guard led me to a WC. I groaned and spilt, doubled over. When I tottered out, the guard gave me a chair, and the driver brought me a cup of tea. They hovered anxiously, watching me try to sip it. A stench reached my nostrils; I couldn't tell if it was mine.

“Auntie,” the driver said, “he says you are right. The cemetery was there.” He pointed up the hill to where more buildings stood. “It was moved five years ago. They needed the land for housing. This zone was selected for development.” The guard's wide smile bounced up and down. “It is all new here. The houses are very modern.”

“It covered the top of the hillside,” I said. I didn't want to believe it. “There were thousands of headstones. Whole families were buried there.”

The graves were moved, the guard proudly said. To a much nicer place across the valley. Experts came and selected the best location. Most of the graves went one place, though some went to another. The government paid for everything. If you wanted a new headstone, you had only to request it. Records were kept of who got moved where, but the guard didn't know which department had them. Families from the valley all knew where their ancestors were; they didn't need a bureaucrat to tell them. When he finished work today, he would visit his own mother and father. With the payment he had received for his permission to move them, he had ordered a month of temple prayers, plus hosted his whole family, including nieces and nephews, on a sightseeing trip to Suzhou. They had always wanted to see the famous gardens. I should be sure to go there for a visit.

“Your driver is very good,” the guard said. He clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “You should hire him to take you. He is a trustworthy man.”

My driver tried for the rest of the day to help me find where they had moved my family's graves. I had a handful of names but not all of their proper characters, and the dates I had were spotty. Offices were closed, records missing. My confusion made the task harder. We grew hungry as we worked and ate the soft bread rolls, the nuts, and the apples. At the failing light, I said the search was over. He said he would bring me again tomorrow, but we both knew it was fruitless. We drove back in silence. I gave him Father's cigarettes and paid him double. All night I sat in my room with the lights blazing and the ball of yarn in my hand. The whiskey burned through me like flaming money. On the balcony outside my room, I set thin paper sheet after sheet on fire until the hotel manager knocked on my door to stop me. I set my hand on top of the ashes, but they were already cold.

T
here's more to tell but I'm done with sorrow. Tomorrow, I will read a good book or take Yan for a drive to a place she's never been. If Ari ever comes home, I'll have her read these pages. She's the only one who knows the exact shape of my shame. I yearn for the sound of Father's voice, for the touch of Mother's soft hand. I still have the yarn and the little jade buttons. Their bones I lost the day I abandoned Mu-you.

CHAPTER 28

ARI

G
ran was in terrible shape when I got there. She was in a Chinese hospital, dehydrated and jaundiced. She had broken her left foot in a slip on the sidewalk. She was lying in bed like a shrunken mummy. Her eyes were closed, her hair was lank and stringy, her cheeks sucked back into bone. I realized I had never seen Gran lying down before. I had never heard her so quiet. Her big bosom looked collapsed under the blanket. When she opened her eyes, she didn't seem to see me.

“You don't need to look so shocked,” she said. “I'm not on my deathbed, to everyone's disappointment.”

I gave her a kiss and looked for a place to sit, but the only seat was the edge of her bed, so I stood there awkwardly, my duffel bag making a bulge in the paper curtain drawn around her bed.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Gran said. “Go find yourself a chair.” She struggled to sit up. “I've got to get out of this place. It's driving me mad, listening to all the moaning and groaning. Father never would have put up with it.”

“I'm fine,” I said. I had noticed, walking in past the long rows of beds, that the other visitors were sitting on three-legged folding stools they had brought for themselves, and were feeding their relatives from little boxes of food carried from home, the patients like hungry babies with eager, open mouths.

“Suit yourself,” Gran said, and then she made a crack about looking so yellow. “It was worse two days ago. The young man who empties the bedpans said my eyeballs looked like a cat's.”

“You look good,” I said.

“Ha. At least nobody is mistaking me anymore for a foreign devil.” She lifted a hand from the blanket. That, at least, looked as large as ever. I took a step closer and clasped it. “Thank goodness you're here,” she said, gripping. She shut her eyes tight. “It's been quite awful. Thank goodness you've come.”

T
hey kept Gran in the hospital another ten days. I spent every day with her, staying until after dinner. I bought my own three-legged stool and a set of nesting containers and filled the snap-lid boxes with meals cooked by the hotel kitchen. The nurses were kind, especially when they learned that I was the American granddaughter, and started calling Gran
“Po Po
,
”
as though she were their grandmother, too. They had so many patients to take care of that they were perfectly happy to have me feed Gran and wash her and insist she take her pills. Sitting beside her bed, I recalled what I'd seen in the emergency room in Kunming: people arriving at the hospital with six-packs of Pepsi and buckets of KFC, their
guanxi
getting their children and spouses and grandparents much faster attention, patients no more bloodied than I was, who got called to the desk and led behind doors while A.J. and I sat on hard chairs and sang our Whackadoodle song and waited. I started bringing extra food from the hotel buffet every morning and Belgian chocolates from the gift shop. Gran became the staff's most popular patient.

Soon after I got there, I reached out to WeiWei. She was back in Guangzhou, her assistant told me. I sent her an e-mail, and she called me right away, asking how she could help. I'll come see you, she said; it's only a two-hour flight. She'd book her ticket and send me the information. I started sleeping better, knowing that WeiWei was coming.

After a week, Gran began walking the hallway on crutches, her arms surprisingly strong, though her legs looked withered. She was determined to walk out of the hospital under her own steam, but she overdid it and had to go back to bed. The jaundice was past; she had regained her coloring, but now she flushed pink with aggravation at herself and her own stupidity, she said.

“When did I get old?” she demanded. “My weakness bores me.”

In the evenings I made my way back to the hotel slowly. I was staying at the fancy place where Gran had a big room, but the hotel air was thick and motionless, the gilt and mirrors too shiny. I preferred to poke my head into crowded storefronts and smell the mix of the city streets, an odor I remembered from Beijing and Kunming, part damp, part green, part garbage. It was wonderful, after the open landscape of Alaska, to jostle with other shoppers and jump across oily puddles and risk my life crossing the broad streets. There was no such thing as pedestrian safety; the cars and trucks and pedicabs and scooters careened and barreled, so the only way I could cross was to attach myself like a limpet to a more practiced traveler. Usually, I chose an old person because anyone younger darted so fast that they were all the way across before I realized that their feet had left the curb. The old folks were saving me every time I crossed the road.

At night, I talked to Charlie or Les and gave them a report on Gran's progress. She had banned them from coming and didn't want to talk to them herself, and so they had to hear it from me. The doctors had done some procedure that fixed a small problem with Gran's liver, I said, which sent them both ballistic. Charlie pointed out that Grandpa George had died of liver cancer, and Les ordered me to move Gran to a Western medical clinic—“Go find some decent doctors, for God's sake, before they kill her,” but Gran refused. I think it pleased her to drive them crazy.

“Tell them I have every confidence in my doctors,” she said. “Dr. Lin knows all about Herbert's research. He didn't know of Father, but of course he's far too young.” The Western hospital, she said, would charge her an arm and a leg. “An arm and a leg and a finger,” she said to me as a joke. I brought the man who emptied the bedpans a Big Mac and fries while Gran bragged to the patient in the bed next to her that we'd be leaving in two days.

O
nce out, Gran deflated. She stopped doing her exercises and stayed all day in the room. She wouldn't say much about why she had come to Hangzhou. It had to do with her parents, she said, and her sister, Rose, and her younger brother, Mu-you. I came on a wild-goose chase, she said, and though I said I understood, she retreated back into silence. I asked her if she wanted to go home to California; she shook her head no. The doctor had ordered her to put on some weight, but she ate very little. She wasn't able to sleep at night and dozed during the day in fitful spurts that left her irritable and morose. I tried to amuse her by talking of other things, like books I'd read and my job in Alaska. She wasn't interested. I asked her questions about growing up in China, and she said it was ancient history and not worth telling.

My thoughts, like Gran's, began to spoil. WeiWei moved her dates, then had to move them again. She'd be there, she assured me, as soon as things settled down. She was back on the interview circuit. Her book was doing well: her publisher had changed it from a memoir into a novel.

When I went looking for Aaron, and when I rushed to Hangzhou to rescue Gran, I had a purpose, a mighty distraction, but now, with Gran silent and no clear path before me and the hours lengthening into dragging days, the black ditch reopened by a crack at my feet. I began to hear the old whispers: Who were my mother and father? Did they ever think about me? Were they sorry for what they did? If they had held me in their arms for another day, a week, a month, a year, would they have changed their minds and kept me? In the crowded streets, I found myself studying the flashing faces for some secret message directed only at me, a signal that I was known or recognized or at least taking up space on the sidewalk. Kunming came back to me, though I had tried my hardest the past eight months to barricade against it. The stump of my finger pestered me for attention. In my darkest moments, I imagined cutting it off to finish the job I had started. I wanted to bury it, as I had meant to do the first time, to leave a piece of me behind in the country of my birth.
I am alive. This is where I'm from
.

“Gran,” I said, “let's take a trip. Where would you like to go?” The only thing I knew how to do was to keep moving.

“Nowhere,” Gran said. “I want to stay right here.” She hunched underneath a slippery hotel blanket and refused the good food that the chef sent up on a tray. I paid our bill weekly, nervous that Gran's credit card was going to max out, but somebody—Yan, maybe—was looking after finances on the other side of the ocean. She wouldn't trust Les or Charlie. They might use a frozen bank account to get us to come home.

One afternoon, a white American family with a Chinese daughter got into the elevator with me. I guessed the little girl was about four years old. Her mother looked high-strung and athletic; she reminded me of Robyn. Her father was older, soft-bellied and mostly bald. The little girl was chatting happily to her parents in English. When a young hotel desk clerk got on, she said hello to the little girl and asked her if she was having a fun visit.

“Say ‘
Ni hao ma
,' ” the mother prompted.

The little girl shied away and grabbed for her mother's knees.

“Ni hao ma
,
”
the mother urged her. “She knows how to say it. She takes lessons every week.”

“That's very nice,” the young woman said. She bent way down and smiled. “
Ni hao ma?
How are you?”

“We want her to be able to speak the language of her birth country,” the mother said. “We think it will give her a real sense of identity later.”

The little girl stared in icy hatred straight at her own reflection in the mirror.

I
called Yan. I didn't want to call Charlie.

“I'm worried about Gran,” I said. “She's very unhappy.”

Yan was worried, too. “She's spending too much money. Even a rich lady should be more careful.”

I asked her what I should do. Hangzhou was full of sad memories, Yan said. “Take her to Kuling. She was always happy there.”

When I told Gran where we were going, she closed her eyes and slept.

S
o at last we arrived at Lushan Mountain, called, in Gran's day, the district of Kuling, near the city of Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province. It was early May. Snow draped the rounded peaks of the surrounding mountains. The air was clear and cold. The hotel where I had booked us was ugly and modern, but nearby was a lake with a wide path around and stone benches for sitting and watching the sky in the water. There were many more hotels than there had been before the war, but the low mist and narrow-topped mountains and thick forests drew Gran's feasting gaze. She remembered the morning light and the dark, dripping branches and how swiftly night fell after the sun set. It smelled the same, she said, and the town didn't look all that different from when she was a girl going with her mother from shop to shop to buy paper and ink and tea. We hired a driver one day to take us to the residential section where Westerners used to own summer houses—Gran's father had rented one of those houses several summers in a row—and Gran thought she recognized a few of the gates and rooftops, but most of the houses had been torn down and replaced with modern villas. Her father's house, the one he'd at last been permitted to buy once the war was on and the Westerners were getting out, had stood behind one of those gates. They had lived there just one summer before they, too, had to leave.

“What happened to the house?” I asked.

Gran shrugged. “Gone,” she said. “Taken. So much for that dream. But we were happy while it lasted.”

Gran was using a cane; for longer distances, she still needed a wheelchair, so she told me to go on a hiking tour without her. I went with an English-speaking guide who took me up and down winding mountain paths on our way to the Cave of the Immortal. The mist hanging above the deep valley and the white, ribboning waterfalls in the distance made me think of Alaska. I got back and found Gran sleeping in the sun on one of the stone benches, a hotel blanket tucked around her in strict violation of the posted hotel rules, so I knew that she was feeling better. We had found a small restaurant that Gran liked with big windows that looked out into a grove of green. Every night, we tried different dishes—mushrooms with thin slices of sausage, egg omelet with tiny local fish, eggplant, spicy cabbage. Gran's favorite was a clear soup with floating dumplings no larger, Gran said, than the tip of her finger. She nudged me when she said that, and I laughed at her sly expression. She said that if we both could laugh at such a tasteless joke, we must be feeling better.

One day, after Gran had told me a story about how she and Rose and Mu-you had gone down the street to an Englishwoman's house to look for their mother and, while waiting for her, had eaten every morsel of food in the poor woman's pantry, I asked Gran if she would tell me what she remembered of Mu-you. He was funny, she said. He had a mischievous sense of humor. He hid himself behind chairs and popped out laughing. Rose didn't like it when he pulled her pigtails, but Gran let him grab at hers, and her father let him tug his forelock, which Mu-you liked to do after taking off his father's hat. “Father used a hair oil that had a strong scent. Mu-you didn't like getting it on his hands. So one time Father put molasses on his hair instead. Mother scolded, but Mu-you jumped up and down.” She paused and settled. We were sitting on the hotel balcony, catching the last of the day's sun. “Father loved to laugh when he was with Mu-you.”

We told each other a little more after that, and a little more the next day. I talked about Steve and Peg and Noah. Gran told me about Mu-you and the lost family graves. We didn't try to explain ourselves or comfort each other. I asked her why, if I never knew them, I missed my birth mother and father. “Family pain lasts a lifetime,” was all that Gran said.

Later, as I was helping her get ready for bed, she brought up my birth parents again. “Draw every breath in their honor,” she said, “but remember that air is weightless.”

Eight days. Eight was a lucky number. After eight days in Kuling, Gran said she wanted to go home to California. She had made her return. It was time to leave again.