3
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