—In the nineties there is a Chinese professor in an American college. She has a Ph.D in comparative literature. She teaches Chinese language and a variety of courses on Chinese culture and literature. To her American colleagues and students, she is very Chinese. Yet her Chinese friends say that she is westernized. Some suspect that she is a feminist, because she is too independent. She has a son, whom she chose to raise by herself after a divorce. It seems unthinkable that she is doing quite all right without a husband.
Can these be the same person? Can this person be me? Among these, which is the real me and which are the roles I have played? Once in a while I even doubt my memory. But I am sure of one thing: since I was a child, I had a feeling that the materials of which I was made were ill at ease with one another.
My parents brought me into this world on December 1, 1950. My father, people said, was an old revolutionary. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1940s. My mother, who graduated from Yanjing University (now called Beijing University) the year before I was born, was a new enthusiast for the Maoist revolution. She, like many of her peers, believed that only the Chinese Communist Party could save China. It would provide secure jobs for intellectuals and liberate workers and peasants from slavery. It would root out corruption that had plagued all the previous governments and revive China's economy that had collapsed in the 1940s.
One thing the adults liked to tell my generation when we were young was that we were the most fortunate, because we were born in new China and grew up under the red flag. In my case only part of this was true. I was born in new China. But when I was one year old, my parents took me to Switzerland. There I grew up under a red flag, not one with five golden stars symbolizing the Communist Party and four hundred million Chinese, but one with a large white cross on it. That must have messed things up for me from very early on.
In Switzerland we lived in Bern and Geneva, in quiet and comfortable surroundings. At that time there were four of us in our family: Father, Mother, Aunty, and I. From Monday to Saturday, I hardly saw my parents. They were both busy working at the Chinese consulate. In the morning they always left in a great hurry; in the evening unfinished work, meetings, or banquets kept them away. By the time they got home, I was already fast asleep. On Sunday, Mother usually slept until noon and Father until two o'clock in the afternoon. So in those years Aunty was about the only one who was always there for me.
Aunty, I later found out, was no relative of ours. She was my nanny. My paternal grandmother, whom I called Nainai, hired her in Beijing shortly before I was born. Five days after Mother gave birth to me, that is, as soon as we left the hospital, Aunty took over the work from Mother. Henceforth day and night, it was she who fed me, washed me, and rocked me in her arms. I fell asleep to her soft wordless songs. It was her smile and her voice that I remembered when I was a baby. My own mother, on the other hand, left me when I was barely one month old. She flew to Switzerland to resume her work. As for my father, I did not meet him until I was one year old. At that time he came back to report on work. While he was in Beijing, he celebrated my birthday with me. Afterwards he took Aunty and me to Switzerland.
On arrival at our new home, Father said: “Now in China it is a new society. Everybody is equal. There are no more masters and servants. People are of one big family. So let Rae, our little girl, call her Aunty instead of nanny from the start.”
Thus I learned to call her Aunty. For me, the word Aunty was dearer than Mother and Father put together, and over the years I became more important to Aunty than her own daughter, whom she had tried hard to forget. I do not know when my parents found out how I felt or how they took it when they found it out. Were they sad or glad of the fact that because of their dedication to the revolutionary work, they let a nanny steal the heart of their only daughter whom they insisted they loved very much?
When I say this, I do not mean that I did not love my parents. Of course I did. Yet that love was different. It was rational, unlike the mysterious tie that bound Aunty and me together, body and soul. By this, I mean if a misfortune was about to befall Aunty a thousand miles away, I would feel it in my blood. I would have bad dreams at night. Such premonitions were hard to explain; yet they turned out to be right when I had them in 1978. In contrast, when my mother died suddenly in 1976, I did not feel anything. I learned the bad news the next day from Father's telegram.
In the late 1950s, when I came back to attend elementary school in Beijing, I discovered that my attachment to Aunty was not unique. Many of my classmates, who were children of high-ranking cadres, were just like me. They loved their nannies, aunties, or grandmothers more than their own parents. Sometimes the parents became so jealous that they told the nannies to go home. Others let the nannies stay for the children's sake. Of these parents, many were richly rewarded a few years later. That is, when the Cultural Revolution broke out and the parents got into trouble, the nannies took the children into their own homes and brought them up as if they were their own.
Aunty's love for me made her blind to my shortcomings. To her I was the best child in the whole world. My younger brothers were extraordinary kids too. But I was undoubtedly the smartest and prettiest. She was proud of me at all times.
According to her, I could remember things that occurred very early in my life. Such memories were of isolated scenes. The sight, the sound, the smell, and the touch stayed with me. Some of them were quite vivid in my mind. But the context was lost. She and my parents often had to supply the where and when.
In Cold Spring village, the scene that came most often to my mind was of our second-floor apartment in Bern. In the morning bright sunshine poured through the large windows and glass doors. I opened my eyes in the warmth. I saw Aunty's face break into a gentle smile; tiny wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes. I knew soon she'd go to the nearby bakery to buy my favorite pastry. “Little mice bread” was the nickname Aunty and I gave it.
The short while she was away was the most exciting time of my day. I tried to hide myself in the closets, on the balcony, or behind a piece of furniture, knowing Aunty would soon be back and would seek me out. The rest of the day I did not have many games to play. I had a room filled with toys: dolls, stuffed animals, music boxes, little houses, kitchen and tea sets, a train that ran around the room . . . but the problem was: I had no one to play with me.
For five years I was the only child. Although we had neighbors, my parents never tried to socialize with them. Was it because of rules that forbade them to make friends among the local people? Or was it the neighbors who were afraid of being tainted by us, knowing that we were from red China? Whatever the reason, I hardly had a friend in my childhood. So in those years the seed of loneliness dropped into my heart. Later, when it grew into a monstrous tree, I tried very hard to cut it down but I failed. Now I am an adult, I realize loneliness is my fate and I might as well enjoy it: I can sit in the shade of this gigantic tree, far away from the comings and goings of the world. Breathing a deep sigh of sadness and relief, I forget the intricate network of relationships in China and elsewhere.
Despite the loneliness, my childhood was not unhappy. Father, Mother, and Aunty all loved me. I loved them too, Aunty especially. By then, Aunty was in her early fifties. Her long hair was still mostly black, but silver threads were beginning to show around her temples. Each morning she would spend some time combing and oiling her hair. The hair oil sent out a mild sweetness to my nose. Afterwards she'd coil her hair up and pin it into a bun, which looked so elegant behind her head. This, Aunty told me, was the traditional hairstyle for a married woman in China. She had been dressing her hair like this for more than thirty years.
Aside from her hair, her clothes were also traditional. In my memory Aunty was always wearing a slender cotton dress called qipao, which was either silver gray or indigo blue. It fitted her perfectly because she made it herself. European fashion did not affect her. In Switzerland, the only Western garment she had was a fur coat, and even that was a gift from my parents.
Like most women who grew up in old