Dr. Bethune's Children Page 15

  The two years since I parted with them had been full. I had resumed contact with a lot of friends in Chinese academic circles. With their encouragement, I had started to write articles for Chinese newspapers, and I got a lot of good feedback. To be honest, I did not really want to resume contact with my parents. Had these incidents not happened that day, I probably would not have made the telephone call to my mother. Warning me that I might suddenly lose my memory or even my life, the day’s incidents served as fateful reminders.

  At ten o’clock in the evening, I placed a call to my parents’ home. I had hoped it would be my father who picked up, which would have been less awkward. But the voice I heard was my mother’s. She seemed to know who I was before I even said anything. “I just got back from the hospital,” she said, as if the two years of silence between us did not exist. I was a bit disappointed that my phone call did not surprise her. “I had a feeling you would call me today,” she continued, her tone of voice still extremely calm. I asked what she went to the hospital for. She said she went to discuss some recent blood sugar results with her doctor. She said she had been diagnosed with diabetes soon after she got back from Montreal, and the doctor had asked her to monitor her blood sugar regularly. “My situation is very stable,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t known about her health situation over the past two years. “Diabetes is no big deal,” I said, not knowing whether I was comforting myself or comforting my mother.

  “I am not the least bit worried,” my mother said. “I believe in my genes, that they’re genes of longevity. Look at your grandmother, almost ninety years old now, but she still insists on living by herself and is still doing well.”

  Dear Dr. Bethune, maybe I should tell you a bit about my grandmother’s experience. Not just because she took care of me for a time when I was a child, but also because her life had a connection with yours. Born in the same year as the squirrel, she had no opportunity to become a liberated “new woman.” She was married off by her parents just after she celebrated her fifteenth birthday. Her parents took a liking to the future son-in-law who, as the only son, stood to inherit the family fortune. In comparison with the squirrel, who made her way into the great cave of her own free will, my grandmother had no choice. She had never seen her future husband before she got married.

  My grandmother gave birth to my mother when she was twenty-four years of age. I remember the first time I asked my mother what year she was born, her reply was she was born in the year that you arrived in China. That’s probably why I’m so sensitive about the year 1938. It was much later that I found out Claude was born in that same year.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, my grandmother enjoyed the life of a rich wife for only twenty years, because, after taking power in 1949, your great friend carried out a number of land reforms, under which her husband, who was a gentleman of leisure, was convicted as an oppressor and executed. His public trial took place on a stage erected in their yard. My grandmother and all four of her children, including my mother, witnessed the execution. At the age of thirty-five, my grandmother became a widow with four children, deprived of any means of livelihood. For the first few months, she had to beg to make ends meet.

  All right, let’s return to that call I made to my mother. My mother told me she had just read a magazine article about you written by someone who also lived in Montreal. After finishing the article, my mother said she realized that you weren’t so noble-minded or pure after all. “He wasn’t even good to his wife,” she said. “What do they mean about his devotion to others?”

  I was delighted to hear there was another Chinese person living in Montreal who had a deep interest in you. Dear Dr. Bethune, he must also be your child. I know there must be many such children of yours living in this city. “What kind of person Dr. Bethune was doesn’t matter,” I said. “The main thing is that we all were shaped by the spirit of his noble-mindedness.”

  “But if he himself was not noble-minded, weren’t we lied to?” my mother insisted.

  “No matter whether we were fooled or lied to, we were shaped by our Dr. Bethune,” I said impatiently. “The real Dr. Bethune is not important. The important person is the one who shaped us.”

  “I don’t accept that,” my mother said.

  I did not want to continue talking to her. I wished her happy birthday and good health. Then I prepared myself to put down the phone.

  Just as I was about to hang up, though, I heard my mother’s voice call my name. I put the receiver to my ear again. My mother said she forgot the most important thing. I guessed that it was going to be about that madwoman, but it was about her husband. “Yangyang’s father has been missing for over two weeks,” my mother said.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, only then did I understand why I had to make this phone call to my mother. It was not to thaw the ice, but to hear that item of bad news.

  “Where have they looked for him?” I asked, my voice urgent.

  “Everywhere!” my mother said.

  “Even Graveyard Hill?” I asked.

  “Why there?” my mother asked. Then she started laughing. She told me that Graveyard Hill no longer existed. The government had reclaimed the land and established a high technology zone, what the local media was calling “our Silicon Valley.” But my mother had sensed something in my question. “Why would you think of that place?” she asked, warily.

  I hesitated before replying. “Because other people would not think of it,” I said.

  My mother was no longer curious. She laughed and then asked me to guess what the madwoman’s reaction to her husband’s disappearance had been. My mother’s tone of voice put me off. I said I would not guess.

  “She told everyone not to go looking. She said they would never find him. She said that only she knew where her husband had gone.”

  My mother paused, as if waiting for my reaction. But I didn’t say anything. I knew her patience would run out soon.

  As I expected, she soon continued. “The police were suspicious, of course. They interrogated her for two days and two nights.”

  She paused again, but I still didn’t say anything. “Are you listening to what I am saying?” she asked, impatiently.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you want to know what she said to the police?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “She said he went to hell,” my mother said.

  I felt a spasm in my heart. But I did not know who I was unhappy for.

  “I don’t know if she is really mad or if she is just pretending,” my mother said. She coughed a few times before continuing. “What a scary woman she is! How could she reward her husband with this?” She coughed again and then said, “Everybody knows he has cared for her for over thirty years, ever since the first time she went to the mental hospital.” My mother then sighed.

  My mother’s sigh made me very anxious about Yangyang’s mother’s situation. How would she cope without her husband? But I did not dare express my worry. My worry about Yangyang’s mother would only make my mother very unhappy.

  All I could hear was my mother’s coughing. She was clearly agitated. “I want to see how she’ll cope by herself,” she said, apparently gladdened by the madwoman’s misfortune. Then our conversation got cut off.

  A Stage

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I’ve never understood why my mother hated Yangyang’s mother. They used to get on well, starting soon after Yangyang and I became friends. I recall my mother sympathized with his mother, because her husband had gone to the May Seventh Cadre School, and it couldn’t be easy for her, raising her son on her own. “We are basically in the same boat, like sisters,” she said, recalling that she, too, had had to live apart from her man with a child to raise. Even after Yangyang went missing, she continued to express sympathy for this “sister.” Yes, she did tell me to avoid his parents, but I thought this wa
s because she was trying to make their loss easier to bear. And then, all of sudden, she changed completely.

  Why the change? I have never asked her. But now I figure it must have been her intuition that caused the change. An intuition about the love between Yinyin and me.

  My high school was on the other side of the city, and I spent most of my years there living in the school dormitory, so I did not see Yangyang’s parents for several years. I did occasionally ask my mother about them, and she was always very cold, saying she had not seen them, either. In Montreal, she once commented on this reticence, saying that she didn’t mention Yangyang’s family because she didn’t want such news to have an impact on my studies.

  It was only when I was at university, home from Beijing for my second summer vacation, that I had any contact with Yangyang’s family again. I was at the market with my mother, close to the high school and our community compound, when a quiet, friendly girl walked towards us. She and my mother exchanged greetings, and my mother told me that she was the orphan that Yangyang’s parents had adopted. I did remember the dazed little girl I had seen seven years before, on that momentous afternoon, and was amazed at the changes that time had wrought. My mother said Yinyin was a student at the high school. She had just taken the gaokao, the highly competitive national university entrance exam, and was considering attending university in Beijing.

  “An ill-fated girl,” my mother said with a sigh, and then told me about the family. Yangyang’s mother was in a mental hospital again, mostly on account of that girl. Calling her “that vixen who crawled up out of the rubble,” Yangyang’s mother had accused her adoptive daughter of trying to seduce her husband. She threatened to return the girl to the government agency responsible for transferring her from the earthquake zone eight years before. She also threatened to divorce her husband and kill herself. “There are no waves without wind,” she told everyone she met. She promised that one day she would “catch them in the act.” Everyone thought both the waves and the wind were in her imagination.

  There was one time when she thought she had proof of their guilt. After Yinyin finished evening study, Yangyang’s father went to get her on his bike. Like all parents, he let his adopted daughter sit on the rear bike rack. Yangyang’s mother was hiding beneath the old camphor tree close to the community compound, and they came past, she jumped out, grabbed the handlebars, and screamed that she had finally caught them in the act. Yangyang’s father explained that all parents let their children ride on their bicycles. This explanation enraged her. “That’s their own flesh and blood? Who’s riding on your bike rack?” Before Yangyang’s father could respond, she added, “She’s just some little vixen that crawled out of the rubble! It’s totally different.”

  Soon thereafter something more serious happened, when Yangyang’s father bought Yinyin a bilingual Chinese-English dictionary as a birthday present. According to my mother, the madwoman insisted that the birthday should not be a celebration but a memorial, because it was also Yangyang’s birthday. Moreover, like all Dr. Bethune’s children, his mother said, Yangyang had never gotten a birthday present. Birthday presents are for petty bourgeois, symbols of a corrupt lifestyle. And Yangyang, she said, had always spent his birthday doing something meaningful—cleaning elderly neighbours’ windows, for example, returning screws he had found in the road to the factory, and—let’s not forget—kneeling in front of Chairman Mao’s picture to beg his forgiveness. She ordered Yinyin to rip up the dictionary and flush the pieces down the toilet.

  Before going to sleep that night, Yangyang’s mother sat washing her feet in a porcelain basin next to her adoptive daughter’s bed. Humming a popular song, she stared at Yinyin, who had just lain down. All of sudden, her expression changed. She reminded Yinyin that she had yet to do something meaningful to celebrate her birthday. Yinyin sat up, and then, to her astonishment, the madwoman started crying. Yangyang’s father rushed over, but he did not know what had happened and did not know what to do. A little later, he reminded Yinyin that there was a mock exam the next day. Finally, Yangyang’s mother stopped crying. She reminded them that the meaningful thing Yangyang had done on his last birthday was to recite the Old Three before going to bed. And she asked Yinyin to do the same. “This is the best way to commemorate your older brother on this special day,” she said.

  Yangyang’s father got angry before Yinyin had the chance to react. He said that memorizing those “red” texts was no longer the thing to do. “You can get her to memorize something classical,” he said. “Like ‘The Old Drunkard’s Pavilion’ or ‘Ode to Yueyang Tower.’”

  These suggestions enraged Yangyang’s mother. “I said that your relationship is abnormal, didn’t I?” she shouted. “I only want her to commemorate Yangyang’s birthday. What’s wrong with that?” She picked up the basin and dumped the water over her husband and Yinyin. Then she smashed the basin on the floor and grabbed a pair of scissors on the desk, threatening to stab herself in the throat.

  Yangyang’s father subdued her in time. Then, with the help of a few neighbours, he stopped a truck at the entrance of the community compound and took her to the mental hospital.

  When he returned, afraid the neighbours might believe what his wife had said, he sent Yinyin to a relative’s home. She stayed there for three weeks, including the days when she was taking the university entrance exam, until Yangyang’s mother was released from hospital.

  That was the first news in years that my mother had given me about Yangyang’s family. The stories she told made me feel very sad, and I had trouble getting to sleep that night. A little girl I had met on that historic afternoon had grown up, but the environment in which she lived was so dark. Seven years earlier, she had been saved from the edge of hell only to fall into another hell. I thought I had a kind of responsibility, one I could not shirk. I knew I was the only one who could help this girl escape the hell of her life.

  If she really chose to go to Beijing to study, I felt she would be choosing me. I kept imagining us sitting on the train to Beijing. I imagined her sitting by my side, leaning softly against me. “You are my life,” I said in my heart. Tender is the night, I thought, for the first time in my life.

  Two weeks later, Yangyang’s father came to see us. When he knocked on the door, my mother’s intuition kicked in, and she motioned for me to hide. Confused, I sat in my room, at my desk, listening to the conversation outside. Yangyang’s father told my mother that Yinyin had received her acceptance letter to Beijing Normal University. My mother praised her, saying that she had always felt that she was a good child and had a bright future. Yangyang’s father then said that the reason he came was to ask whether Yinyin could travel with me to Beijing. My father thought it was a good idea, but my mother’s tone of voice was not encouraging. This was the first time I noticed my mother’s negativity towards Yinyin.

  My mother did not actually veto Yangyang’s father’s request. She came up with an excuse, saying that, given how difficult it was to buy train tickets nowadays, she had already asked a friend working in the provincial government to help get me a ticket. I knew this was a lie, but Yangyang’s father seemed not to have noticed that my mother was trying to put him off. He asked what day we had gotten the ticket for. My mother hemmed and hawed and in the end told him the day. My father must have known she was making it up as she went along, but he did not dare say anything. Yangyang’s father said before leaving that he would try to get a ticket on the same date for Yinyin.

  The next evening, my mother took me to the home of a friend who worked in the provincial government and asked him to help buy me a ticket to Beijing either for the day before the date she’d told Yangyang’s father, or the day after. On the way home, I asked her whether I could just go on the same day. My mother said my father did not have time to take me to the station that day. I was astonished at her determination to prevent me from taking the same train as Yinyin.

  Her intuition was anot
her source of astonishment. She had a premonition about my relationship with Yinyin long before I did—and about the way it would end. At the time, she was not willing to tell me the secret in her heart. It was only on the evening when I returned Yinyin’s ashes to our home city that I asked her why she had been so determined to prevent Yinyin and me from getting together. My mother’s reply was simple. “I just did not want you to be cursed by association with that family,” she said calmly. “Now you have seen the power of my premonition, and it’s a shame you yourself didn’t see it.” She shook her head and did not finish her sentence, but I knew she was going to add, “before it was too late.”

  Yes, perhaps she did anticipate it all. But she had no way to prevent any of it from happening. This must be the meaning of yuanfen, the Chinese Buddhist idea of a predestined affinity between people. Maybe it had its source in Yangyang, or maybe even in you, dear Dr. Bethune. On the day I was travelling back to Beijing, we ran into Yangyang’s family on the railway platform. His father saw us first and walked over to us to say, “We could not get a ticket yesterday,” he explained. My mother responded with her excuse, saying, “We were going to leave yesterday, but his father wouldn’t have been able to….” Yangyang’s father cut her off, exclaiming, “What a coincidence!” And my father followed up with, “It’s yuanfen.” My mother stared at him angrily.

  Yangyang’s father greeted me. He said that the last time he had seen me, I was still a kid. Kids grow up fast, and now I was a young whippersnapper. When he mentioned the last time he saw me, I felt nervous. Did he mean seeing me at the entrance to the neighbourhood movie theatre? That was the last time I remembered seeing him. I had never told my parents about this encounter, but I had never forgotten about it. I never will.

  Yinyin was standing to one side with Yangyang’s mother. “She wants to come to send off the child,” he said to my parents, “but she does not want to see anyone she knows. This is the first time she has been out of the house since she came out of hospital.” My parents looked at her. “She is much better now,” he said, adding that he was still worried about her, and especially worried that this send-off might cause a relapse.