Legacies. A Chinese mosaic

Transitions  SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1989 ... Hu Yaobang, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, dies.

A dear friend who, as I write, is in a Chinese prison once told me this tale:

For want of something to do, a prisoner gleaned from the sweepings of the shop floor tiny bits of glittering wire, which he deposited in a bottle. Years passed. On the day he was freed, there was nothing to take with him to mark the passage of those years except the bottle, and so he carried it away.

Back home, he rose and he ate and he slept at the exact hours the warden had decreed. Too old to work anymore, he spent his days pacing, the exact space of his long confinement--four paces forward, four paces back, four paces forward, four paces back.

For want of something to do, one day he smashed the bottle to count how many tiny bits of glittering wire he had collected. He wept. At his feet lay broken glass, and a clump of wires rusted solid in the shape of a bottle.

I was ready to leave Beijing. My life, after a stay of three and a half years as the wife of America's ambassador to the People's Republic, had become all too much like China, full of contradictions. I worked and did not work. I had changed and I was the same. I had scores of good friends and none at all. I was celebrated and I was suspect. I was an equal partner and not even on the team. I was an insider and an outsider. I was at home and I was exiled. I had never been happier, nor had I been as sad.

Before the bits of my China passage fused beyond examination or shaped me irrevocably, I had to piece together the puzzle. I could not hope to do it in China, where unending activities were routine, where every Chinese had lived a life that tempted me to write a book, where my own life had become too complex and too difficult. I needed solitude and space. I needed to return to America.

My husband, Winston, for his own compelling reasons, had decided the previous summer that he would be resigning as ambassador, though he would remain in the post until a successor had been appointed by the new president, whoever that might be.

On the afternoon of the fifteenth of April, 1989, amidst the preparations for our party to bid farewell to our personal friends, the office called to announce the death of Hu Yaobang. Winston had met the former party secretary, at an intimate dinner in Zhongnanhai, the sanctum where China's revolutionary leaders live like royalty behind high garden walls. I had not.

Out of power since 1987, when he was formally removed from the Party's top post by Deng Xiaoping at the urging of the conservatives, Hu Yaobang was that rarity among Chinese leaders--he was himself. He departed from the text. He succumbed to emotions. He was interested and interesting. A tiny man, shorter even than his mentor Deng, he literally and figuratively seemed to jump about. Sometimes he teetered on the giddy--as when, in the pursuit of hygiene, he advocated that the Chinese chuck their chopsticks and use forks instead. Sometimes he charged into forbidden zones--as when, in the pursuit of rectitude, he attacked corruption at the pinnacle of the Party.

These qualities both endeared him to and alienated him from Chinese, one and the same Chinese. Since the reforms had begun, a decade before, Chinese had been, if anything, ambivalent. They were disgusted by the righteous masks that officials wore to hide their human face, yet they were used to having their leaders look a certain way. From the reign of the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, to the supremacy of Mao, the correct demeanor had been remote, rigid and reticent. These were hardly adjectives to describe Hu.

Knowing of Chinese ambivalence, I did not expect his departure to affect our party that evening or China that spring. I had forgotten that death prettifies. True in any culture, this is especially true in a culture rooted in Confucianism, which accepts form, the more malleable, in lieu of content. To Confucius, the consummate realist, proper conduct, the more knowable, was the measure of man. To ask mere mortals to discipline their thoughts as well as their actions would be asking too much--form would suffice. And so Chinese embraced ritual, the ultimate form. Mourning being the ultimate ritual, Chinese mourned extravagantly. Even in the era of the consummate ideologues, who measured man, above all, by his thoughts, they continued to do so. Thus extravagant mourning, urged by tradition and tolerated by the Party, provided an occasion for students--who sincerely grieved at the passing of the man pushed out of power by the conservatives--to publicly parade their sorrow as well as their concerns for China. The y
oung mourners elected Hu Yaobang their hero, and in death the former party secretary became a champion of democracy ten feet tall.

As usual, many guests arrived at the Residence earlier than asked. This is a Chinese custom, based, as most customs are, on necessity: without one's own car it is difficult to time an entrance. Like many Chinese practices, the early arrival is the opposite of the American custom--being fashionably tardy--and no matter how I advanced dressing, I was often late for our own parties. (Winston resisted being a minute early or late, which is most telling--Chinese adapt, Americans stick to their guns.)

This night was no exception. Though I was downstairs a half hour early, a group of writers was already huddled in the den, which we had dubbed the July Fourth Room because it was seldom used except on that day, when the masses mingled and munched in the garden while the Ambassador and the ranking Chinese guests were sequestered there, formally seated and served--a local tradition that Winston and I detested. Class consciousness was alive and well in this classless society.

As I joined them the writers complimented me on my dress, which was the red gown of an imperial official with the rank of egret, just the right ironic touch for a resignation soiree. Then the debate resumed. To be or not to be a minister was the question bothering the writer from Tianjin, who had heard that he might be offered a post in the Ministry of Culture. Again, that ambivalence. Chinese throughout history aspired to officialdom. It was honored above all occupations, and dubbed the "Ladder to the Clouds." But since Liberation--the first of October, 1949, when Mao Zedong stood on the balcony of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, overlooking Tiananmen Square, to proclaim that the civil war had ended with a Communist victory--working at the Ministry had posed a terrible risk. Few had escaped unscathed. Many had been disgraced or worse. In the People's Republic art was created not for art's sake but to bolster the current Party line, and since that zigged and zagged, what was laudable one day might be criminal the
next.

I advised my old friend to take the job. Better, I said, to have a writer in the post who cares deeply about artists than a Party hack or the corrupt son-in-law of some member of the Politburo. He nodded with a slow, ever-widening smile. I winked, certain that I had caught him mentally fondling the perks that came with the office. Shaking a finger, he reminded me of my advice of some years before when he was being recruited vigorously to join the Party. Would I still advise him to join, he asked, or would I now second his decision not to? I blushed. Before living in Beijing, I had thought that it was not only possible to reform the Party from within but that this was also the surest way. Lately, I had begun to have doubts--doubts planted by my friends who belonged to the Party. If they were not optimistic, how could I be?

While the others discussed the desirability of being embraced by the Party, the writer from Tianjin and I drew a little apart. Wondering when we would meet again, we slid naturally into reminiscences about how we had met, how he had become my oldest friend in China.

I had left Shanghai in 1946 as a child of eight. I returned after an absence of twenty-seven years, to discover a kinship that binds inalterably. For no matter what path and however far they travel, Chinese cannot outrun the shadow of their ancestors. A hollowness which I had not realized existed was filled upon homecoming. Hearing my clan's stories, I imagined the life I might have led. Traveling from Guangzhou to Xian, I saw the new China and met many members of my family, young and old. Yet more astonishing than the warmth of these reunions was the making of a lifelong friend.

It was 1973. China was still imprisoned by the Cultural Revolution. Some of my nearest kin dared not see me. Others avoided being alone with an American, afraid of what might happen if no one could corroborate our conversations when they were questioned later by the authorities. This I finally grasped one afternoon when nature called at one and the same time--many times--to two of my aunts, who sheepishly locked arms as they scurried from the room. Thereafter I vowed to suppress my brash American ways, to do nothing untoward, to avoid compromising any Chinese.

Then, on my last day in Tianjin, inquisitiveness overcame caution. Spying the tallest Chinese I had ever seen, bounding past my aunt's door, I asked about the young neighbor and learned that he was a star athlete, a prize-winning painter--and a writer. There went my vow. I promptly invited him to dinner, forgetting that such impulsiveness might prove troublesome. After all, before Henry Kissinger feigned a stomachache in 1971 and took Winston along to meet secretly with Premier Zhou Enlai, over two decades of hostility had divided China and the United States. Furthermore, Americans like me, who look Chinese, speak Chinese and have Taiwan connections, were especially suspect. But writers the world over are a curious breed, and the neighbor eagerly accepted my invitation.

At the restaurant, Peking duck tasted like food for the soul, so nourishing were our discourses on books, art, what's old, what's new. We marveled at the unexpected in our lives. I, who had set out to be a chemist and never dreamed of penning anything but formulas, had once stopped at a reception to chat with a publisher. That happenstance led to my writing Eighth Moon, the story of my youngest sister's life in China. He, who had just graduated from high school and never dreamed of playing basketball, had once stopped in a park to watch the city team practice and had caught the eye of the coach. That happenstance led him to a place on a championship roster.

My relatives at the table laughed uproariously at our tales of the unforeseen, but I sensed that their hilarity masked tears. Each had suffered so profoundly from the fury of the Red Guards during the first year of the Cultural Revolution that the wounds inflicted then had yet to heal. Talk of happenstance, however humorous, could not fail to trigger doleful memories.

To change the subject, I showed photos of home, forgetting that our dog was in the pictures. I had meant to keep him a secret. Apollo gulped beef daily, submitted to annual checkups, had even attended charm school to learn how not to violate the sensibilities of neighbors. To Chinese, whose cloth, oil, meat and grain were strictly rationed, a huge Labrador could only be anathema and its owner first cousin to Marie Antoinette. Flustered, I sputtered a long, agonizing apology. My new friend smiled. "Don't be foolish! People everywhere are the same. I once had a singsong bird, and at every meal who do you think had the first pick of rice?"

He was not only a man of many talents but a man of heart.

At the end of the meal he announced, "I shall paint something for you."

I was pleased, envisaging a graceful sketch.

"But you must promise to return for it and see more of China."

Now I was intrigued.

Two years later, he wrote, "The painting is finished." The timing seemed perfect. I was soon to accompany Winston and Secretary of State Kissinger on an official visit to Beijing.

But the political climate was wrong. Zhou Enlai, the architect of the new relationship with America, was dying of cancer; his pragmatic protege Deng Xiaoping was losing power and the ideologue Madame Mao and her Gang were prevailing. Our Chinese hosts accorded us a chilly reception, and I was not permitted to go to Tianjin.

The following year the city suffered an earthquake that took over 200,000 lives. My friend wrote that everything in his apartment had been ruined by water or smashed into rubble. Everything but my painting, which had been sealed in a biscuit tin.

I began to think that destiny was at work. Until then I had regarded the painting as a gracious thank-you for dinner. Chinese artists have a tradition of giving rather than selling their works to friends. Indeed, while one famed artist was a houseguest at my great-aunt's home in Hong Kong, her cook had wheedled a valuable painting from him for every breakfast, lunch and dinner he served. "That's fair enough," the artist said with extravagant modesty. "My work for his work."

In 1979, when I returned again, China had finally emerged from its holocaust, and Deng had flung open its doors to reforms and to the world.

My friend had grown a little heavier. So had I. But our friendship was as rich as moon cakes. The moment had come. He fetched the biscuit tin. It was the size of a can of tennis balls. He opened it and took out a silk scroll. His wife held one end while he slowly unrolled it. I was stunned. The painting was his version of the Sung masterpiece Life Along the River on the Eve of the Festival of Pure Brightness, painted by Zhang Ziduan. Down through the centuries, copies of such national treasures have been painted by masters and prized. So ingenious was my friend's artistry that even the subtle changes in hue and the ravelings that must occur after eight hundred years of being admired had been faithfully reproduced.

The painting starts on the outskirts of the capital, where shopkeepers on donkeys and peasants on foot travel among rice paddies past gentlemen sipping tea in pavilions and coolies unloading grain from barges moored along the shore.

At the Rainbow Bridge a crowd has gathered. There is trouble. A ship's mast has been caught in the arch, and a few yards upstream the crews of other vessels, their way now blocked, labor desperately to forestall disaster. Those safely ensconced on dry land and atop the bridge know better how to accomplish this and generously shout their advice.

The path is dotted with restaurants and open-air markets offering all manner of goods. Contented guests savor the breeze from the balconies of inns, large and small. Greening willows line the city's moat, and on its banks sedans, wheelbarrows and oxcarts share the way with plump pigs and idlers upright and reclining.
An ornate, arching roof graces the main gate to the city, through which passes a caravan of camels. Banners are unfurled. A scholar wearing a wide-brimmed hat is attended by three grooms, and members of the gentry in long gowns exchange news of the Empire. Citizens listen to the pitch of the patent-medicine man and the yarns of the storyteller. Water carriers replenish their wooden pails at the well. Customers at a peddler's...