Blue Seas, Mulberry Fields

By H. Yuan Tien

Born in the walled family enclave or siheyuan built by
his father, Weijie braved through, and later watched from afar
in America, the existential evanescence of life in the city of his
birth. All that is encapsulated in the ancient saying: "BLUE SEAS,
MULBERRY FIELDS" (????)? He had witnessed the
successive ends to the epochal colors of the place: the brilliant
yellow of the imperial age; the imposing red wall-boards of the
revolutionary era; and the stern grey of the outer walls of the
siheyuans that dominated the landscape throughout the city. Weijie's
existence thus was part and parcel of this tale of three cities in one:
Peking-Peiping-Beijing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493168248

H. Yuan Tien

H. Yuan Tien, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University, has since retirement devoted himself to literature: Blue Seas, Mulberry Fields; You Just Never Know: Tales from Contemporary China; Party Empire

Book preview

Chapter 1

T he residential structure known in Mandarin Chinese as siheyuan (pronounce si [as in ‘sit’]— huh—U.N. )—and in English as quadrangle—is a courtyard family home. Defined by its thick windowless outer walls of stolid grey brick, the siheyuan is the classic residence to which the affluent achievers of Peking society retreated for their well-earned rest at the end of their working day.

The walls of the Fang (pronounce Fong) family siheyuan stood as staunchly anonymous and leadenly forbidding as those of her fellow fortress-like neighbors. But harboring within those walls was Father’s rhapsodically unique garden-home that featured not one, but multiple courtyards of varied dimensions. Each of the cozy, heartening rooms arrayed around the perimeter of their respective open-spaces looked out upon lush realms of flowers and fruit in bold or shyly glancing display. These were the secret gardens hidden behind the siheyuan’s stern grey outer walls, all tended with loving, liberal benevolence. It was Father’s conception of Heaven on Earth, his own beckoning shelter of tranquility, conceived in sublime inspiration and coaxed lovingly into the world.

Father had built his siheyuan in anticipation of his retirement. Here in the nurturing, bounteous peace that its walled seclusion would provide—his congenial embracing oasis of inspiration—he would ensconce himself to set down the narrative of his fortuitous and fertile life.

Alas… within days of my birth… , the treacherous wiles of Fate transformed Father’s beloved siheyuan into my orphanage…

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Though I had no mother and no father, nonetheless I was blessed. For I, Weijie Fang—or Fang Weijie in the Chinese way of putting the family name first—had the best the world could offer in my orphanage. For me, Fate had wielded her kinder hand. She had not decreed for me the perilous life of the parentless waif, nor the depraved abuse of the wretched Dickensian institution. She kindly arranged for me, instead, a home touched by Heaven and filled with caring siblings and devoted household servants, all of whom showered upon me their indulgent attentions. Steeped in the indwelling elan of their expansive kindness, they all assumed for my sake the role of loving parents. Only gradually did it come to me that other children had a mother and a father. Before I matured into this knowledge, these two kinship terms deflected off my child mind, unprocessed and unabsorbed, remote extrinsic abstractions unrelated to me and my sense of wonder at the world and my innocent contentedness to be in it.

Somehow I learned of the word gu’er, orphan, and knew that it somehow applied to me. Later, when I gained the greater understanding that comes with the age of reason, I wished that all orphans would be so lucky as to live in a gu’eryuan—an orphanage—such as was mine. Yes, the Fang family siheyuan was a haven, an oasis, a cornucopia, an all-in-one enclave that endowed her inmates with her sunny disposition and generous blessings. Her well-guarded insularity—as I look back upon those early years—spared me the upheavals and disasters that occurred on the outside. About the time I became fully cognizant of the circumstances of my entry into the world, the dots were connected, and I could feel her love, thickened and solidified, and… unconditional. She was, I knew, committed to her mission as loving protectress, forever.

As far back as I can remember in my journey deep into the recesses of budding consciousness, I’d always thought of Father’s siheyuan as a warm, caressing, sentient being: like the mother I never knew. Even up into the logical sphere of maturity, my notion of the siheyuan as being a she has never left me. Half a world away from my adopted home in America, she remains a she in my heart. And throughout the long years of my distant, estranged existence, I’ve also often wondered: Upon whom is she bestowing her blessings now?

For she had embraced, as well, all the human souls in my heart: my siblings and half-siblings, and—no less important for their impact upon my life—the servants, whose constant kindly presence had extended my sense of family. Each and every one of them, indulged me freely, in all possible ways, leaving their indelible mark, creating the person I have become, and imbuing me through their vivid reminiscences with my sense of our family from its traceable origins. It was thoughts of them that had sustained my essential identity throughout the unexpected years of no return, after China and America had slammed their doors against each other.

Had I known that my temporary educational sojourn in America was destined to become permanent, would I have ever left?

I think not.

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I took leave of China shortly after World War II. A distant clan relative had helped me gain admission with a full scholarship to a small college in America. Just barely twenty, I left the country of my birth and crossed the Pacific eastward to Meiguo: The Beautiful Country.

For a long while, despite its exhilarating atmosphere of peace and freedom and its broad, compelling, bounteous beauty, Meiguo brought me no comfort. I languished in melancholy yearning, nursing a morbidly illogical sense of having been eternally and unjustly banished from her, my siheyuan, my graceful, sweetly enveloping garden home. Truly, in America, I did thoroughly feel for a while like an orphan, someone with no one, an anonymous pining speck blown by an evil deity into an unknown alien world.

Yet, oddly, at times, as I moved about the campus, a feeling of having been here before would well up from within. That clock tower, those two brick buildings juxtaposed just so, the quadrangle a-scurry with the between-classes rush, all taunting me with their mystifying familiarity. I was disconcerted, gnawed upon by this disquieting, impossible incidence of deja vu.

Was I going mad?

Not me, I sternly told myself: the mad sister I never knew had a different mother… . I shook myself to fling away the frightening thought, to banish it as one would some loathsome slimy thing squirming on one’s skin.

Then in a flash it came to me: the source of that uncanny sense of revisitation resided innocuously in my mind, absorbed from the classic and contemporary Western literature I’d avidly read in translation as a youth.

How vividly rendered those descriptions had been!

There had been many stories about my father as well, imparted to me by the household servants. Tell me about Baba! I would implore, as earnestly as I would beg for stories about Ali Baba and the forty thieves.

Father. Who—or what—was he, this amorphous entity of my cultivated imagination: was he real, or was he just a character in my own hopeful fairy tale?

One of the servants in particular, who’d been sold to the family in his late teens long before I was born, had served Father the longest…

. . . Only now, as I write, does the enormity of the word sold strike me.

. . . Sold! . . .

. . . I’d always thought of Zou Seng more as a member of the family than as what that word indicates he essentially was: a man from nowhere who could be bought and sold. That made him… a slave! . . . no less a slave than America’s Nat Turner, even though much better treated and virtually regarded as a member of the family who could never be demeaned by a price tag.

Still, he had come to the family by means of an oral bill of sale…

The injustices of the world, the random bestowal of blessings vs. condemnation to wretchedness—all by accident of fate—turn my thoughts to wonderment at the good fortune (at least mostly) that I have had the privilege to enjoy in this life.

Zou Seng—to continue with my account—had initially served as gatekeeper. Posted at the entrance of the siheyuan, he cordially greeted arriving visitors and welcomed them into our home with his elegant flourish, while finessing polite yet firm deflections of adventurers, scurrilous or otherwise. He looked forward to his elevation, as Father had promised, to the position of butler or as driver of Father’s horse carriage.

Old Zou Seng had been a family adjunct since long before I arrived as Father’s finalizing flourish to his complement of offspring. He’d enlightened me in countless animated ways, filling me in on Fang family arcana that had escaped the informative intentions of my brothers and sisters. It was he who told me of Father’s rejection of tea in favor of coffee, and of how Father had advocated throwing out the traditional breakfast of deep-fried dough sticks (youtiao), thin rice porridge, salt-preserved duck eggs, and pickled peppery mustard root, in favor of the vanguard Western breakfast of coffee, bacon, and bread slathered with sweet creamery butter and fruity jam; or simply a chaste bowl of oatmeal and milk. Father, Zou Seng said, had embraced the new dietary creed as an essential step in redressing China’s appalling image as the Sick Man of East Asia.

This withering epithet for China that bleakly personified the nation’s sorry state of decline had originated with the writer Zeng Pu [( 56758.png ) (1872—1935)], who’d signed off on his muckraking 1894 novel, Flowers in a Sinful Sea (Nie Hai Hua 56763.png ), with the pseudonym, Dong Ya Bing Fu ( 56765.png ): Sick Man of East Asia. The poignant imagery of Zeng Pu’s inversely patriotic nom de plume mourned the great nation that China used to be.

Father had come of age in the Sick Man era, when China’s sovereignty and extended rule over long-established tributary states was eroding under the enterprising pursuits of newly confident foreign powers aflame with expansionary ambitions. Bit by bit, the audaciously aggressive competitors advanced upon their strategic plan to satisfy their voracious hunger for ever more of China’s bounty, slicing off expanses of territory here and there. With each amputation, yet another inviolate, historically sanctioned source of tribute and influence assumed to be forever within the purview of Chinese power was lost. And the Days of National Humiliation accumulated on the calendar.

For Father—just as for the great majority of the various peoples who sheltered within China’s borders—there was no escaping the deepening trauma of China’s rapidly lengthening procession of military defeats. Still, when it came to daily life, the impact of the growing disaster played out like the passing significance of the infotainment newsreel.

Then the Sick Man of Asia portrayal burst forth from the conceptual arena of identity and self-image and slapped the nation to attention. The derisive epithet impinged upon the collective consciousness, penetrating like a dagger into the psyche of each and every individual: the nation’s abstract, quotidianly remote military humiliation had, at last, become personal humiliation for everyone.

A tenet stemming from the days of Confucius topped all other contemplations in the agenda of national salvation: the future of the empire—as well as of the family—hinges upon the betterment of the individual. The illness that plagued the Sick Man of East Asia had now become critical. China was teetering on the precipice of annihilation and needed to embrace a curative regimen before the spreading and multiplying vectors of its illness sent it headlong into the grave. Proper nutrition, hygiene, exercise—the conscious, overt cultivation of health and well-being—became a leading national goal. How futile would be China’s emulation of the outside world’s technological, scientific, and military advances if it lacked able-bodied citizens to wield them in the defense of its national sovereignty!

It was these concerns that inspired Father to abandon China’s national drink. Still, for all its legendary cachet, and its desirable, healthful characteristics and infinite variety—green, oolong, white, black, post-fermented: Dragon Well, Iron Goddess, White Fur Silver Needle, Hupei Black, Puerh, etc.—in his quest to do the right thing by his country now dedicated to its self-strengthening goal, Father switched from tea to its robust and invigorating newly arrived competitor: coffee.

And the typical Chinese breakfast—thin porridge of rice or millet accompanied by steamed meat-stuffed buns that flowed with melted fat when split open or bit into—came to provoke enlightened disapproval in the nation’s quest to muscle-up and remake itself. Father replaced his traditional morning repast with foreign—that is Western—breakfast fare, the superior nutritional value of which was amply displayed in the superb physical condition of the foreign invaders, as well as of the Western personages with whom he’d come into contact in the course of his searching mission abroad. The posthumous effect upon the son who never knew him, was that I took to Western foods and beverages as easily as I learned my native tongue.

Coffee, for instance. I had my first taste at around age ten. It took no cajoling from others to get me to man the hand-operated coffee grinder that Father had carried back with him from America. How deprived I felt when the Japanese aggression of the 1930s put coffee beans—a premium imported item—out of reach for even those of more than modest means. At the first opportunity—years later—my love affair with coffee resumed: on the American President Lines passenger ship that carried me across the Pacific to the land that would become—through the mysterious realignments that arise out of fractured fate—my permanent home.

In the college dorm dining room I continued to nurse my caffeine addiction on the rich superior flavor of its coffee. Then I discovered the cinnamon roll. The delicate yet robust complexity of this ingeniously contrived confection that was standard Sunday breakfast fare seduced the appetite with its mildly spicy, come-hither scent that singularly enhanced the aroma and taste of freshly brewed coffee. This exquisite First-Day treat provided a welcome respite from the dining hall’s dubious other offerings: dry cereal soggily drowned in cold milk; lumpy white vomitesque stuff called cottage cheese; chicken-a-la-king with its nauseating coat of greasy gravy; and the truly off-putting concoction appropriately named crap-on-shingles. It took quite some time, as well as a considerable reduction of my already slight physique, to coax my palate into accepting these exotic alimentary delights. Fortunately, the chefs wielded a repertoire that included some dishes that wooed my taste buds until I decided I liked them, such as Spanish rice, meat loaf, roast chicken, and beef steak. Here my appetite amazed my college mates. They marveled at my ability to pack such prodigious amounts into my startlingly concave stomach. But most surprising of all to them was my enthusiasm for coffee.

No likie tea! they would jape in fake Chinese accent.

Weijie no likie Chinee!

Guffaws and smirks.

In the face of such prankish teasings, I feigned genial equanimity. Which detente-seeking strategy merely provoked them into expanding my English vocabulary: my new word for the day acquired from their kindly instruction was: turncoat.

Some of them, who seemed to be members of some sort of exclusive clique, tried pulling my leg in a more subtle, seemingly friendly manner. They came over to sit with me one day, all smiles and hail-good-fellow. One of them tore open a dining room tea bag, tapped the leaves into a cup, then poured a small amount of hot water over them. After some minutes, he drank most of the cooled tea, taking care not to swallow any of the leaves. Then twiddling the little remaining liquid so that the leaves stuck to the cup’s interior surface, he plopped the cup upside-down on the table, draining it thoroughly into the tablecloth. He glanced back up, his wry, got-the-drop-on-you James Dean smile fixed upon me. Then with a little triumphal flourish he turned the cup back upright.

Look, Weijie! he drawled with a roguish superior air, pointing out the random pattern the tea leaves had formed on the cup’s interior surface. Are we all getting A’s on our exams?

I looked at him, thoroughly puzzled—what on Earth was he talking about?!

Ha, ha, Weijie! he laughed, tossing his head back with gleeful superiority as the others egged him on with chortles and smirks. "What else have you forgotten?!"

Some weeks later, another bunch of fellows approached my table wearing that telltale get the Chink look. That they would set about to pull the exact same stunt said something about their intellectual qualifications to be in this school—clearly legacy students propped up by their daddies’ dough. Truly I wasn’t surprised, which was why I was ready for them.

You all seem smart, I complimented them. "But you are all in a rut. What you’re doing is a dead art! The leaves are all soaking wet, and they’re cold, too. They have no life to them. Dead leaves tell no live truth!

What you should all study, I continued, adopting a more solemn, instructive air, "is how to read hot tea leaves."

Here I pulled out from my bag a tin of high quality Dragon Well tea, which I’d sent away for from a specialty store in New York. With a decisive plonk, I set it on the table.

You see, I said, "this is tea."

Methodically I opened the tin, pinched a likely amount between forefinger and thumb, and with a flourish dropped the leaves into a cup.

Watch, I said, and I poured hot water over them, slowly, until the steaming water gurgled up to the rim. The leaves came alive, swelling, stretching, somersaulting about, some settling to the bottom, some floating to the surface, releasing a brew of an enticing, delicately perfumed scent.

Now, I broke the stiff silence, fixing them in my gaze as they took in the tea-leaf acrobatics. What could these hot tea leaves be telling us?

They locked their wary eyes, blinking uncertainly, then turned them back on me. Was that a glint of desperation breaking through their practiced cool facade?

They are saying… , I announced archly, "Drink me!"

Reading tea leaves never came up again.

And everyday thereafter I enjoyed hot cups of coffee in peace.

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Over the ensuing years, this hot-tea-leaves incident tucked itself away into some obscure niche of my memory as I pursued the pressing exigencies of life. There it lay dormant until the late 1960’s, when tumultuous, rapidly unfolding events in China recalled to me the roiling imagery of those tea leaves swelling, stretching, and tumbling about in the boiling hot water. Writ large, indeed, was the turmoil in China, a sweeping canvas of upheaval: the surging, irruptive growth of the dictatorial bent run amok. The more I sought to decipher the storm that was swelling and stretching with cloaked implication across the country of my birth, the further removed from the domains of tea-leaf humor it became. Encompassing the entirety of the vast nation as they were, the heaving convulsions of persecution and destruction were far removed from any complaisantly sly college kid joke.

I resolved to vanquish the daunting antipodal distance—that cruel continental and oceanic expanse that lay between me and the land I would have ever called home had it not been for an accident of Fate. Only merging back into the tableau of China’s daily life would make possible a reading of the hot tea leaves, comprehensively, in terms of then and since: my experience there before the USS General Gordon carried me off for my educational sojourn abroad; and here in the New World, from the time when Mao’s revolution in China sprang forth from fractured history and transformed my temporary academic pursuits into a permanent American life.

But mine was a resolution doomed. Iced many times over was the road back to China. I could but stew over being locked out, and worry about those locked in, and salve my dismay and frustration—my full-blown case of homesickness—with sun-drenched dreams of return to my lovely siheyuan, she whom I’d left behind only temporarily. And though I hadn’t seen it for years, I dreamed of regaining the endearing object of my childhood fascination, my all-enfolding magical garden ensconced behind the walls of the Fang family siheyuan in the capital now known to the world as Beijing. More than a score of years would pass before relative amity would supplant the simmering hostility between the two nations crouched warily on either side of the Pacific. America’s bland Fifties would pass with no word from my homeland; then its turbulent, consciousness-raising Sixties. But it would take the daring lunar landing in outer-space to persuade the two recalcitrant, holier-than-thou nations that amity and partnership held far greater reward than contention and finger-pointing, and my dream of return would at last gain entry into that long-elusive realm of possibility.

In 1973, soon after a ping pong ball had broken the ice between the U.S. and China, I set out with my wife, Keren, on that long deferred westward journey back to the East.

Chapter 2

W hen I was born, the name of the ancient Northern Capital of China appeared on maps around the world as Peking, or Pekin. This was a gift of the French, who had—amidst their missionary exertions four centuries prior—bequeathed upon the city housing the Imperial throne a practical phonetic transliteration of its name. In the wake of a series of coups and warlord struggles that began when I was a child, the national government shifted its seat away from Peking to a city situated much further south, near the mouth of the Yangzi River. This was Nanking—the Southern Capital—the city to which the emperors of the Song Dynasty centuries earlier had retreated in the face of the invaders from the northern plains. The city of my childhood, then, having lost its status as capital of the nation, was re-christened Peiping: Northern Tranquility.

In 1949, the newly established People’s Republic of China restored the northern city’s status as the nation’s capital. But the Pinyin system of phonetic spelling devised in China’s ensuing project of language reform effected a radically new transliteration of its name. The auld Northern Capital known to the West as Peking now became Beijing.

Two and a half decades prior to this event, in 1923, Fang Tienwu, my father, had built his house in the western sector of Peking, just outside the boundaries of the Forbidden City, address: No. 21 Houdali. This street name could well be translated: Ultimate Destination Lane.

From this favorable location in the very heart of the nation’s capital, he would daily venture out to enact his official role in life and return again in the evening to the comfort and beauty of his home at the end of Ultimate Destination Lane, the Fang family siheyuan. His life stretched out before him into the bright and beckoning future, by which time his siheyuan at No. 21 Ultimate Destination Lane would have matured into a burgeoning, blossoming, inspirational haven for his well-earned comfortable retirement, during which he would write his memoirs.

It was here in the eastern chamber of Father’s beautiful garden home that I was born, with a midwife in attendance.

But Father never attained that sagely stage of life which had beckoned to him with promises of leisurely accomplishments. Called away before he’d reached his official finish line, the chance to meet his final son was lost to him. And I, born on the heels of his unanticipated passing, never had the chance to pay him my filial respect, let alone see him through his declining years, as all sons should.

Then for unfathomable reasons, Mother, too, slipped off into the nether world before her wailing boy had achieved one week of earthly life. Perhaps, I like to think, Father had called to her, and she’d said yes to him for that one last and eternal time.

As a child I’d often wondered about them, imagining how it was that Fate had brought them together: Father, the man of substance in his elegant Mandarin suit, and Mother lissome and slight in her slim dress, strolling through the heavenly efflorescence of his beautiful gardens, leaving the essence of their existence in the very places I knew and loved in my playful and innocent childhood days.

All that I know about both Father and Mother, then, came to me vicariously, through the informative offices of my siblings and half-siblings, as well as the household servants. In bits and pieces over the years, I learned of how Mother had been brought into the household as a yatou—a slave girl—and how she’d by and by become Father’s favorite maid. Ostensibly, Father had elevated her to be his second wife, though there’d been no ceremony. He’d simply taken her into his room in the feudal tradition of shou fang, that is: receiving into the chamber.

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The Fang family siheyuan at 21 Houdali was built with the same type of large gray bricks that comprised Peking’s city walls. It stood apart from the few, far lesser, houses in the vicinity, at the southern end of one of Peking’s myriad hutongs, that is: narrow, winding lanes that crisscrossed like a maze all throughout the city proper. Walking through the hutong called ‘Houdali’ toward the Fang family siheyuan, one would remark the brick houses of modest dimensions lining the western side of the hutong. Facing them across the way sat two great growing mounds, one of neighborhood coal ashes, the other of excavated earth from nearby housing construction.

Father had designed his siheyuan himself, embodying the same principle of prudence and wisdom with which he’d conducted himself in the uncertain halls of officialdom. He’d taken to heart the bureaucratic adage, Tall trees catch the violent wind, as well as the proverbial wisdom, "a wily hare has three burrows (jiaotu san ku 56769.png )." Barring catastrophe—the higher the position, he knew, the greater the peril of catching the brunt of arbitrarily shifting imperial displeasure—barring such catastrophe, his new siheyuan would guarantee a comfortable retirement. Its realization crowned his improbable rise from humble provincial origins.

In choosing where to build his haven of inspiration and creativity for his productive retirement years, Father had decided against a site conveniently situated near his work location on the east side of the city. His initial enthusiasm had wilted when he discovered that that ideal venue spurring his homesteading aspirations to soaring heights—that area famously elegant and burnished with cachet, renowned for siheyuans of chateau proportions, the homes of royal and otherwise elite pedigreed clans that dominated the landscape with their proud and elegant aristocratic mien—had, of late, become infested with foreigners, known as yangguizi [ 56771.png ].

To that dark nimbus of extended Yangguizi occupancy in Peking’s eastern sector had been recently inserted barracks burgeoning with occupation troops that had marched in with the regimented mien of authority along the wrecked railways in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Everywhere the ‘foreign devil’ soldiers were out and about, hordes of edgy armed youths shipped in from half a world away, bravely flaunting their feigned show of superiority and raising dark, insidious anxieties. From Great Britain and Ireland they came, and the United States, and Japan, and Germany, Russia, Italy, France, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How could one possibly learn all those different languages? Who knew when one nervous, homesick boy would go berserk and the bullets would start flying, or when one miscalculated move on the part of any Chinese citizen might provoke a consequential misunderstanding, or worse: an international incident?

Father briefly considered the open tracts of land lying adjacent to Alien-Supplicants’ Lane East (Dong Jiao-Min Xiang), the isolated hutong designated in dynastic times by Imperial decree as a ‘quarantine’ zone for Western envoys. But again—to his enervating frustration—those abutting virgin tracts vivid in his memory had also succumbed to the urgent housing needs of the growing foreign presence.

In his search for a congenial site, Father had been viscerally struck by the ever-enlarging numbers of self-invited ‘guests’ out and about in Peking wielding their weapons of war—or economic guile, or religious truth—and the implications that this alien presence had for Chinese sovereignty and self-respect. Truly he came to realize the grindstone weight of cultural assault that had somehow come to be lashed around the neck of the nation. And there wormed into his consciousness a sense of danger for the national identity, a personal and collective debasement that poisoned his sense of sovereign righteousness and well-being. Heartbreaking, it was, that here in this particular vicinity—the once beautiful and beckoning Peking East—he could barely force himself through his work day, let alone build his house.

Father widened his search for a homestead, eventually settling on the site at the southern end of Ultimate Destination Lane in Peking West, far from the teeming influx of yangguizi.

How ironic, this horror he’d developed at the mere thought of residing in the shadow of the foreigners. There had been a time when he’d viewed the men of distant climes as fascinating, intriguingly exotic, warmly sympathetic outlanders whose ingenious ways were worthy of study and emulation. And yet, the helpless humiliation he could not but endure alongside that of his suffering, sorely beset countrymen, was tempered by nothing less than admiration for the capability—nay, the brilliant ingenuity!—with which those Yangguizi—those foreign devils—pursued their interests.

Surely China could—and should—learn their tricks!

Thus, over the threshold tramped across by foreign boots, there now streamed out Chinese search and discovery missions seeking ways to expel those outrageously self-aggrandizing wielders of the alien sword—those loathsome, pitiless… .

. . . Nay… He must not be too hard on them: those soldiers—as anyone who took a close look would apprehend—were mere boys who, in their naivete and underprivileged, perhaps even benighted, circumstances, ended up as pawns of war, bound to obey orders. Someday, he imagined with pangs of sympathy, they would be plagued with guilt and regret…

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Father, having come of age in that dark and turbulent time, had in his own youth—his own privileged youth, free of the economic—or social, or political—pressure to don the uniform of a soldier—he had thrown himself obediently and with unflagging diligence (not a playboy wastrel, he!) into the progressive offerings of the newly designed educational system that stressed mathematics, physics, chemistry, and physical education. These were the avant garde avenues of knowledge imported from the West that supplemented—even supplanted—China’s traditional curriculum based on the literary classics. Eventually it came to him to travel as a member of an official delegation dispatched overseas to observe and absorb the critical principles and habits of mind that generated the success of Britain and the other imperialistic powers that had turned their covetous eyes upon China.

Father’s observations in London, New York, Tokyo, and other great cities of the world, transformed his concept of national trajectory, public service, and the contributory life effectively lived. In his broadened view, China’s embrace of the If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em strategy now struck him as simplistic, superficial, and naive, an anemic, merely imitative response, far insufficient for the perpetuation of the nation’s integral, genuine self. What price, he asked, ought a multifaceted civilization boasting nearly two millennia of history and cultural éclat pay for the foreign-born concept of modernity? Should it be an unchallenged given that China’s essence as a unique cultural and socio-political entity be included in that price? A heartbreaking loss it would be—would it not?—a foolish sacrifice to mindless copycat change, indeed! Modernization, rather, could—and ought—to occur within the bounds of judicious preservation. The vitality and uniqueness of China mandated—by virtue of its political, geographic, and literary significance over two millennia—that its inimitable substance and heart be nurtured, strengthened, and toned as an essential component of the modernizing agenda.

Naturally, he observed, the nation’s continued existence as its integral, historically ratified self, sadly but crucially depended upon the acquisition of more and better military hardware, the modern weapons of war wielded by those very nations casting their covetous eyes upon China. Still, armaments could not stand as an end in themselves. Inevitably they would prove of little value beyond the immediate situation. The ultimate, more far-reaching end to these modernizing exertions, rather, was to create an environment of perdurable stability, a goal which new equipment alone would hardly suffice in the endeavor to achieve it.

On this front, Father averred, the crucial missing component was: health. There was a reason why the rest of the world referred to China as The Sick Man of East Asia. Incensed as was even he by that barbed label and its lurking undertones of pity and contempt, he knew it to be only too appallingly true. Freighted with its malnourished and ignorant multitudes, China had indeed become a weakened nation, whose cohort of robust, able-bodied and able-minded citizens was far too small to sustain and perpetuate its heritage of national identity. In that bleak fact resided the ravenous, slavering specter of China’s mortal danger.

The urgent task was to enact enlightened policies aimed at widening access to basic education, as well as infusing the curriculum with new knowledge from abroad. Both the improvement of the quality of its people and the fortification of the national defense were crucial tasks that depended upon lifting ever greater numbers out of their enslavement to necessarily limited brawn and into the endless possibilities of the brain.

These were the circumstances which had inspired Father to rethink his concept of proper human nutrition. Stepping out of the protected environment of his youth into a new, lethally predatory world, he’d taken a hard look at that long-vaunted, exquisitely Chinese drink: tea. It wasn’t the comparative merit of tea vis-à-vis coffee based on scientific analysis; in fact, as I would discover decades later, the harmful effect of coffee had been noted in one of his translated volumes on hygiene. Rather, it was the influx of the hordes of coffee drinkers exhibiting robust health that had convinced him of its value as a drink of salvation. Coffee stood tall and alluring next to tea. Clearly the physical stature and strength of the alien soldiers who imbibed of its aromatic essence proved its vastly superior healthful attributes.

Father had also cast a disenchanted eye upon the traditional Chinese breakfast of watery rice gruel and steamed white-flour buns. For the sake of national integrity and the men who stepped up to defend it, this inherently inferior first meal of the day had to be replaced with stick-to-the-ribs Western foods.

Father’s appreciation of foreigners and their ways, however, was limited and tempered, more akin to judicious adversarial respect. His was a selective, wary, begrudging admiration grounded in his abhorrence for their insulting presence as alien occupiers—How dare they!—but inevitably coupled with the hard fact that China was in no position to expel them. Even a boycott of foreign goods as a means of symbolic resistance, he well knew, would be a hopeless, perhaps even foolish endeavor, akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, a favorite English expression of Father’s, according to San Ge, my Elder Brother Three. Instead, Father had concluded, there were lessons China would do well to learn from these foreigners.

The Twentieth Century had just opened upon a Peking that was much more on edge than the rest of the country. Father had heard from elderly survivors of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) of how the violence of that earlier era had devastated the provinces situated along the Yangtze River. Now in his own time a general cloud of malcontent had settled darkly over the land. Rumbling warnings of renewed turmoil—banditry pursued in the ruthless insanity of economic desperation; and anti-Christian-missionaries nationalist groups, such as the Boxers—were raising anxieties in the capital.

This spurred a rush of reform proposals upon which the Qing Dynasty pinned its hopes for the restoration of its stability and the retrieval of its inherent glory.

But the reforms, as they stood with logical eloquence and satisfying solidity on paper, proved no match for the scheming exigencies of politics and the pressing survivalist instinct embedded in the halls of government. High officials, their well-honed Machiavellian craftiness fully engaged, were throwing fuel onto the simmering fire, and the armed uprisings persisted under their entrenched but distracted and ineffectual governance. Suddenly, there came to the capital the stomach-churning realization that the Qing Dynasty could fall.

For Father, where to locate his haven in life became an urgent issue.

In a more tranquil time, he could have emulated the countless officials over the centuries who’d packed up their Peking acquisitions and retired to their provincial homes. But Father’s connection to his ancestral Hubei had been diluted by time, while the devastation the Taipings had wreaked upon the land meant that he really had no home to which he could return. Giving up everything he’d so painstakingly wrought for himself in Peking—his position, his established residency, his social and professional network—would be no less than discarding the very essence of what he’d managed to make of his life.

Yet his residence in Peking East no longer felt like home. Gradually, as the years blithely slipped by, his neighborhood had come to be dominated by the alien presence. He likened this demographic change to a stealthily growing tumor discovered only in its late stage of development: persistent, unstoppable, and in urgent need of being excised from his life. Ultimately, he selected a site in Peking West upon which to build his siheyuan, No. 21 Houdali.

Chapter 3

T he myriad siheyuans of Peking dominated its flat, windblown loess terrain. Their proudly aloof, steadfast, no-nonsense windowless outer walls provided the capital’s well-off citizens with secure, serene, congenial living environments within their concealed courtyard interiors. The dusky grey brick of No. 21 Houdali’s outer walls conformed to local architectural sentiments, deftly effecting a satisfyingly stern, slightly unnerving appearance. Keep Out! and Stay Away! these walls advised with their forbidding air, deflecting aggressively prying and casually curious eyes alike. Standing at attention in cool dramatic silence, the walls enfolded Father’s burgeoning family into their loyal, protective embrace. They rendered to Father unwavering assurance of the tranquillity he sought, especially during times of bureaucratic crisis. Here installed within his siheyuan’s staunch guardian perimeters, he hopefully could live assuredly by the principle of Yi bubian ying wanbian ( 56773.png ): Cope with all change by brooking no change.

Far from the Luddite imagery suggested in this laconic English rendition, this traditional stratagem more accurately advises—or is interpreted as advising—the handling of volatile circumstances through wielding a fixed principle or policy with judicious flexibility. It was a time-honored tactical guideline for survival in uncertain times.

China’s late Nineteenth Century drive for national salvation in the face of foreign incursions had called for a self-defense based on the principle of Chinese learning as the fundament, Western learning as the instrument (Zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong 56775.png 56776.png ). This reference to China’s grudging, yet vital Open Door acceptance of utilitarian items and ideas from other civilizations, Father had taken to heart when he designed his siheyuan. Insularity had served the Middle Kingdom fairly well in the classic era. Now as the nation urgently mobilized to reassert its suddenly violated sovereignty and to secure its threatened borders, Father’s walled garden home said reams about the turbulent nature of the era in which he’d been fated to live. It reflected the tenor of an unstable period which exhorted change in the face of the desire for familiarity and continuity.

The typical siheyuan’s broad, double-door main entry-way is flanked on either side by stout drum-stones—large discs carved from a single piece of granite or other hard rock and set on low pedestals on either side of the main gate. These ostensibly decorative pieces actually served in traditional times as combination posts and step-stones for tying and mounting horses. Covered with intricate aesthetic carvings in bas relief and topped with a protective creature such as a crouching lion or a mythological monster, these drum-stones also have an elegant, mutedly pleasing effect of setting off the entrance way.

When the double entry doors are unbarred in the morning and swung into their open position, where they remain during the daylight hours, there is revealed to the eyes of outsiders not the courtyard garden interior but rather a looming rectangular structural addendum of matching grey brick, which is called a wall-screen. Seven to eight feet in height, the wall-screen stands stolidly a few paces just inside the main gate, extending slightly wider than the entranceway. The wall-screen’s stern rejection of prying eyes is softened with adornment: a colorful artistic depiction, perhaps, rendered upon a smooth plaster surface, the likes of greeting pines, or symbols of good fortune, or a classical poem in masterful calligraphy. Thus adorned, the wall-screen’s blunt deterrent nature is magically softened into a kinder face of hospitality.

Its beaming suggestion of welcome, however, subtly wafts a gruff underlying warning to those of malevolent intent that a savvy householder might well be out and about in the courtyard concealed behind it. This vertical welcome mat hailing the arrival of relatives and colleagues and friends also cynically conveys the meaning of Enter at Your Own Risk! to those with no legitimate business. On the face of it, the wall-screen is easily breached, but in actual practice it is no less forbidding to would-be adventurers than the severe grey walls staunchly guarding the siheyuan’s perimeters.

Now, according to my appraisal of his legacy, as well as what I learned from my siblings and the servants, Father had an inclination toward creativity. His aversion to unthinking emulation and the stodgy reduplication of tradition is reflected in his design of the entryway to his siheyuan. In the place customarily dedicated to the brick and plaster wall-screen, he installed a second set of solid wood doors. This created a foyer-like area immediately inside the main gate. Within this foyer, on the left side going in, he fashioned a small room for the accommodation of the youngster, Zou Seng, whom he’d purchased as a servant. As the years went by, the boy-servant became a man-servant. But Zou Seng never received the promotion to butler he’d hoped for, and the main inner courtyards remained off-limits to him over the years by custom. He slept and ate in his little foyer-room. His main job was to guard the entryway and to sweep the front courtyard just off the steps leading down to it from the inner set of wooden doors. His secondary job was to polish and drive the horse carriage Father had acquired at the height of his bureaucratic career.

The inner set of wooden doors that usurped the place of the traditional wall-screen consisted of two pairs of double swiveling panels, about 24 inches in width each. The four panels could be opened or closed independently of one another. Each panel could be lifted upward to free its protruding pin-hinge from its base, and then tilted outward slightly for removal. Each pair of the double panels shared the same top and bottom bases. Swinging both the left and right ones to their respective sides allowed free passage in the center. Should the main gate also be open, any passer-by would have an unfettered view straight into the front courtyard.

Father had created the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t wall-screen. With his ingenious, idiosyncratic design, he’d embraced a degree of openness while finessing its opposite. With all four panels pivoted to the shut position, a wide wooden blind materialized that still allowed passage to the left and to the right, just like the classic brick and plaster wall-screen.

Zou Seng had told me much about Father that I otherwise would not have known. It was from Zou Seng that I’d learned of Father’s wall-screen ingenuity. Also that Father had kept the panels closed in the middle much more often than not. It was mostly when distinguished visitors were scheduled to arrive that Old Master would have him swivel those central panels open—just long enough to receive the guests upon their arrival, and then again to bid them farewell.

Had Father’s unique rendition of the de rigueur Beijing wall-screen been born of deliberate, calculated inventiveness—the natural expression of an inborn idiosyncratic streak? Or had it been the atmosphere of his era—thickened as it was with frayed nerves, and bristling with the urgency of absorbing the lessons of foreign invasions—that had induced his flight of inspiration? As I look at it with cool and distant analytical eyes, it seems no accident that his ingenious architectural brainchild amounted to a microcosm of China’s seesawing policies towards foreigners over the recent centuries: now they were admitted, now they were excluded; now they were models of emulation, now they were predatory monsters: sly, covetous, and coercive. Throughout Chinese history, from ancient times to the modern era, the question has always been: To open the door in welcome, or to shut it tight and keep the outsiders out? Whoever these outlanders were, and wherever they came from, and however intriguing they might be, they all inevitably drew a wary eye, regarded not merely as foreigners—the intriguing other—but as barbarians.

Fearlessly, Father went his own way. He wielded his fertile imagination and came up with a marvelously clever way to retain his options to welcome or to exclude. But true to the ancient wisdom, regime or realm changes with ease, but old habits die hard (Jiangshan yi bian, jiuxi nan yi 56779.png ), he kept the panels mostly closed for the remaining days of his life.

What I had seen and experienced on Father’s three-mou (half an acre) of improved land at 21 Houdali was only the architectural brainchild that he left behind. The tangible dimensions of his dream of safety and comfort behind secure walls were to become his final farewell—and my garden paradise.

Chapter 4

W ithin the walls of Father’s siheyuan there reigned on this day the buoyant flurry and smiling effervescence of the Lunar New Year. Family members and servants alike gaily bustled about hanging rotund, gauzy red lanterns from the rafters, pasting gold and vermillion ‘LUCK’ posters on the windows and doors, and suspending florid ornamentation from the ceiling of the covered corridor that elegantly rimmed the inner courtyard. The entire siheyuan glowed with a silken, rose-red hue.

Amidst the bubbling excitement of setting the premises aglow in vivacious, festive red, the household retained a wet nurse for the coming child.

Father had suffered disappointment and the spiritual exhaustion of hopes dashed by repetitive stillborn births and infant deaths. He’d also enjoyed the satisfaction and pride of showing off the living, vital evidence of his potency eight times. Half of these children had come to him through the graces of his first wife, she whom his parents had chosen for him in his youth.

Now the yatou whom he’d taken into his chamber, she who had presented him with the second half of his progeny, was about to honor him with yet another child, the one that would become me. She’d already presented him with four children, nos. 5, 6, 7, and 8, though only No. 8 survived the iffy, tentative period of infancy.

Save for Father’s eldest daughter, she whom I never saw (she’d either been married off, or she’d mysteriously disappeared, as the vague stories went—I’d always thought it odd that no one seemed to know exactly what had happened to her. To this day I wonder about the fate of my original eldest half-sister, who must have been in her mid-teens at the time she vanished)—save for her, all the other surviving children still occupied their rooms at 21 Houdali: my half-brother, 3rd in birth order, and two half-sisters, 2nd and 4th in birth order, all presented to Father by his first wife. And then there was my full sister, Bajie, Elder Sister No. 8.

Shortly after Father had settled into his newly built siheyuan at 21 Houdali, his first wife died, and Mother became his official wife by default. By his grace, then, Mother emerged from the trammels of her bondage—however silken they were—as the free and unencumbered, full-fledged butterfly, emancipated at last from her perilous concubine status.

Yes, it was so: Mother had originally come into the household as chattel, a little slave girl only slightly more than a dozen of years in age. It is hard to think of Mother as having been a slave, like Zou Seng, essentially, though she of