Dr. Bethune's Children Page 17

  She was unable to set out, however, because that’s when she was committed to hospital again.

  That evening, my mother went to the post office to call me long distance. She asked me if I really planned to get married. Yes, I replied. My firm answer agitated her. I told her I’d written to let her know about this about a week ago, but evidently my letter had not yet arrived. She said a lot, giving me no chance to interrupt. She yelled at me for not seeing what that little vixen had up her sleeve and what she likely had in store for me. She told me what the madwoman did that afternoon. She said that even without such a scandal, she would still ask me to change my mind. “Nobody knows what’s gone on in that family,” she said.

  This was a sentence I had heard many times before. My mother had been repeating this ever since that first time I went to Beijing with Yinyin and every single time I mentioned her or Yangyang’s parents after that. She knew my relationship with Yinyin became more and more intimate after that trip, and she did everything she could to put a stop to it. Our marriage told her all her efforts had been in vain. “You should not have gotten married so soon,” she continued coldly. I knew, by the way she said “you,” that she meant only me, not Yinyin. She had never used the second-person plural pronoun nimen to refer and Yinyin and me. “You have to end the relationship with that little vixen,” she said with certainty. That was her ultimatum as a parent. “Otherwise I will cut off our relationship,” she said in a resolute tone of voice.

  I never told Yinyin about my mother’s attitude towards our marriage, though I’m sure she knew. After we got married, my mother never got in touch with us. Our parents did not attend our wedding, which was simple and frugal, even though the two fathers were not opposed to our union. In fact, the day of the wedding, I got a telegram from my father, wishing us happiness. And two days later, I got a letter from Yangyang’s father, a letter to me personally, in which he explained that he could not come to Beijing to attend our wedding because he had to take care of Yangyang’s mother. He said that it was “right” for us to be together, a simple but moving choice of words. He said that from the first time Yangyang brought me to their house to play, he had always felt that I was a good boy. He also said that he believed I would take good care of Yangyang’s little sister. At the end of the letter, just like my father in the telegram, he wished us happiness.

  I reread Yangyang’s father’s letter many times, trying to discover some trace of psychological abnormality, but I never found any such thing. During my mother’s stay in Montreal I interrupted her at one point and asked her what she meant when she said, “Nobody knows what’s gone on in that family.” My mother looked at me, surprised. “Isn’t that obvious?” she said, contemptuously. I mentioned the letter I’d received from Yangyang’s father on my marriage and said I could not see any abnormality. “The letter itself was abnormal,” my mother said. “Of course, he was grateful to you, because he had lost interest in that little vixen, and you helped him out.” Her nasty tone made me feel uncomfortable.

  “Nobody believes Yangyang’s mother’s overactive imagination,” I said, dissatisfied. “At first you didn’t believe, either. When did you change your mind?”

  My mother paid no attention to my question. “I bet that the little vixen never told you about the sick relationship she had with her adoptive father,” she said. “Of course she wouldn’t. How could she? She had so many things up her sleeve.”

  I never told Yinyin about the letter from Yangyang’s father or asked her how she felt about Yangyang’s mother’s accusation. This was not only because I knew Yangyang’s father was a homosexual, but also because I had no interest in the accusation. Even if it had been true, I would still have continued my relationship with Yinyin. My feelings for her and my need for her were greater than those rumours about her family. I believed I could build a new home for her that would remove the curse. In this way, besides being our fate, our marriage was also a kind of responsibility. Dear Dr. Bethune, my attitude towards my wife was the opposite from your attitude towards the woman you married and divorced twice, the woman you promised you would never “bore,” even though you knew you could make her life “a misery.” I was like so many ordinary men who think it normal never to make their bride’s life miserable and never to let marriage become stale and boring.

  On the telephone, my mother said that the projectionist’s accidental death exposed the secret that shocked everyone except “that madwoman.” She did not know that it hadn’t been a secret to Yangyang and me for almost three decades. I did not want to mention my experience with Yangyang on Graveyard Hill. Still less did I want to mention Yangyang’s notebook. “Here in Canada, gay marriage is legal,” I told her calmly.

  Chinese people’s attitude toward homosexuals has now changed but, my mother said, many people still believe that it is abnormal. “But you know their relationship started in the 1970s,” she said, interrupting herself with a fit of coughing. “Had he been caught at that time, he might have died before his son.”

  Her tone of voice in mentioning Yangyang I found equally distasteful. “Imagine if his son knew of his behaviour, how ashamed he would feel,” she added with great enthusiasm.

  “Maybe he knew,” I said deliberately.

  My mother thought I was kidding. “Be serious, okay?” she said in a disapproving tone of voice.

  “I’m completely serious,” I said.

  She seemed to think about this for a while, before going on, first denying that Yangyang could have known, and then adding that what I’d said reminded her that his mother once told her that her husband had lost interest in her, ever since he went to the May Seventh Cadre School. “Now I know the reason she did not show any surprise when she saw those photos,” my mother said. “It wasn’t because she had lost her sanity. On the contrary, it was because she was very rational.” She coughed again, then said, “She must have known all along.”

  Whether Yangyang’s mother knew about the secret before Yangyang or not, I had no idea. This might be an eternal secret, just like Descartes’s notebook.

  “One day, recalling a visit to her husband at the May Seventh Cadre School,” my mother continued, “she said that her husband, though enthusiastic when he was reciting the Old Three with their son, had become an indifferent lover. He was unwilling to touch her and to be touched by her. He said he was afraid of being heard by their son, who slept on the same bunk, or by his comrades, whose bunks were in the same bunkhouse, separated from them only by linen curtains.”

  I had never heard this before.

  “That was the reason I broke off contact with her,” my mother said. “A middle-aged woman who doesn’t get any love from a man is too dangerous. I’ve met a lot of cases like this.” She looked toward the kitchen, where my father was cooking, and continued in a low voice, “That madwoman, her eyes were full of temptation. Even with an honest and respectable man like your father, her eyes were full of temptation.”

  I never thought my mother would tell me so much, but doing so failed to result in any improvement to our relationship. The problem was her attitude towards Yinyin. The secret revealed by the projectionist’s sudden death had made my mother realize her assumption about Yinyin was completely wrong. But she still refused to say sorry to me or to us.

  I think she never will.

  A War

  Dear Dr. Bethune, soon after I broke up with my girlfriend, I moved to the tower that I live in now. What you might call the “cultural environment” here is multi-layered, which I like very much. Among the local neighbours, who are mostly retirees, about a fifth are separatists, and two fifths are federalists. The rest are, of course, opportunists. And the immigrants living here can also be divided, for instance, into new and old. The new immigrants have been here for a couple of days, weeks, or months. They’re still looking around for a good school for their kids and for a nice supermarket where they can get the cheapest green onions. They have
a lot of hopes and dreams for the future. The old immigrants are those who have been here for a couple of years at least. They have gotten tired of all of the votes and elections, of the game of “true democracy.” They’ve even gotten used to the social safety net that attracted them to Canada in the first place. And, more significantly, they’ve discovered that having a passport from a free country does not guarantee absolute freedom. Freedom might have a more direct relationship to wealth.

  Various wars are fought between the neighbours— the war between the new and old immigrants, the war between the separatists and the federalists, the war between the opportunists and the opportunists. Attitudes towards China can also split the neighbours into different camps. Bob, a federalist, and Claude, a separatist, are both Sinophiles. Allied with each other on this issue, they fought against the Sinophobes who enjoy calculating how much harm those poisonous made-in-China toys have been causing our Canadian children, just as back, in 1970s, we children of Dr. Bethune were appalled by capitalist ideology that was poisoning the flowers of our socialist nation.

  War has been a profound part of my immigrant experience. In addition to those bloodless wars between my neighbours in this building, I have witnessed two bloody wars against the same country led by our neighbour to the south. The first, launched by Bush Sr., was swiftly fought and resolved and is generally seen as just. The second, also launched in the name of justice by Bush Jr., ended up messy, nasty, and seemingly endless.

  During that summer vacation I spent with Yangyang in my home town, we talked about justice and war. We were sure no man would think that the war he launched was unjust, just as no man would think that the war his enemy launched against him was just. Every war, therefore, was both just and unjust. This clearly contradicted the law of the excluded middle, which we had learned at school from Yangyang’s mother, who was our mathematics teacher, so we reached the further conclusion that all wars were illogical.

  On a related topic, Yangyang wondered whether you, dear Dr. Bethune, would consent to treat a wounded Japanese soldier. Yangyang said he’d thought about this for a long time. In those days, there was a huge sign at the entrances of all the hospitals in our city which read “Uphold the Revolutionary Humanitarianism!” a famous “highest instruction” from your great friend. We all knew that revolution required us to be heartless towards our enemies, while humanitarianism meant that we should treat everybody as a human being, not divide people into friends and enemies. In other words, we should help everyone without prejudice. Again, according to the law of the excluded middle, your great friend’s instruction was also illogical.

  Later on, we discovered that the law of the excluded middle did not have the last word on many things. There is also the law of dialectics, which enables us to find a hidden unity in opposites by mastering the negation of the negation. Your children were all brainwashed with these dialectics. But would you save a wounded Japanese soldier? We never resolved the problem to our satisfaction.

  Yangyang always approached such questions skeptically and critically. One time, after an air-raid exercise, he told me that even if we described the Soviet Union as revisionist, they themselves would never think of themselves as revisionist. Which is to say that something one side thought was wrong, the other side might not think of in the same way. Yangyang also challenged your great friend’s claim that we have to be opposed to anything our enemies possess. This time, he used common sense. If our enemies believe that people need to eat to survive, does that mean we should not eat? Does the fact that our enemies love life mean that we should relinquish it? And, if our enemies refuse to eat shit, does that mean that we should relish it? Following this kind of logic, Yangyang even doubted the most famous sentence in “In Memory of Dr. Bethune.” Was it possible that a lack of any thought of self was a cunning way of advancing personal interest? These continuous challenges often left me feeling mentally exhausted.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, all the paintings of you that I saw when I was growing up showed you dressed in a military uniform. Yes, you were a warrior. And your life was inseparable from war. As a young man, you were injured in the First World War. In middle age, you risked your life in the Spanish Civil War. And, in the end, you sacrificed yourself to the Chinese people’s war of resistance against the Japanese invasion, which was in fact a part of the Second World War, though you did not know that at the time. If any of those three wars in the first half of the twentieth century had not broken out, your own life would have been illogical. It was war that made your life logical.

  You may claim that your reason for participating in war was that you were a pacifist. But when I delved deeper and deeper into your archives I felt more and more that your motivation was to justify your own painful individual life. If, one day, I happened to come across a copy of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in your archives, I would not be the least surprised. Marinetti declared war on any fixed form, not just the class war between proletariat and capitalist. To Marinetti, war was a source of inspiration. Your own life is proof of that. You were both a Communist Party member and a futurist artist. Perhaps communism is a kind of futurism? The murals you created when you were recovering from tuberculosis in the Trudeau Sanatorium were futurist documents. If we can borrow some words from Marinetti, “who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth” showed “the love of danger” in the murals.

  Marinetti claimed that beauty only exists in struggle, and war is the only cure. This could be a quotation from your great friend’s Little Red Book. I remember the loudspeaker broadcasting his highest instructions every morning—“Never Forget Class Struggle!,” “From Practice Comes Genuine Knowledge,” “Combat Shows True Talent!” and “Struggle with Heaven, Struggle with Earth, Struggle with Man—It’s Endlessly Fascinating!” I still remember those instructions—and others. Like the Old Three, they nourished our lives and created the foundations of our thought.

  Like you, your great friend needed war to justify his life. Peace was a disaster for him. When there was no war, his health deteriorated. So, in the last decade of his life he put on his military uniform once again and stood on the rostrum of Tiananmen, waving at his Red Guards as their commander-in-chief. The name of the war he launched was the Cultural Revolution. He wanted to crush the old world and create a new one. Then Chinese people were divided into two opposing camps. Unlike the opposing sides in any other war, the sides in this war had common ground. They both were “infinitely loyal to Chairman Mao.” And they had all memorized the Old Three.

  The sauna in my building is the main battleground for the wars between my neighbours. Claude, Simon, and three other old men are the most active debaters. These last are two Romanian Jews, both Holocaust survivors, and one sculptor from Hungary who escaped after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. These old men are waging more and more complex wars. Claude detests people whose native language is English. He hates their pride. Simon detests or looks down on people whose native language is French, thinking them limited. These two are civil enemies who are allies in their view of foreign affairs. Both are anti-Semites and fervently opposed to America’s protection of Israel. The two survivors of the Holocaust have no interest in your great friend, because they suffered greatly under totalitarianism, while the sculptor, who also fled from a totalitarian regime, is the opposite. The first time he saw me, he said that he really liked your great friend. He said Mao had a very handsome face. He also said that, at the beginning of the 1950s, in large-scale demonstrations in Budapest, he was one of the students that held up the largest placard with your great friend’s portrait on it. He did not agree that your great friend should be considered a dictator.

  These three old men were ardent supporters of Bush Jr.’s war at first, because no price is too much to pay for the removal of a dictator, and all means are justifiable. Claude would hit back by saying, “The American president is himself a dictator.” Simon would provide reinforcements by saying, “The United St
ates itself is a fascist country.” Their opponents would heap ridicule on these two native Canadians, two naïve Canadians. They said the Canadians had never suffered under a dictatorship, let alone a fascist dictatorship, which is the only explanation for why they clung to such infantile ideas. “The world would have gone to hell without a great America,” they yelled.

  I playfully refer to the sauna as the place where history gets naked, because these old men remember and discuss history there in the nude. But the thing that makes me most curious is not these bellicose old men, but rather another fellow who sits in the corner and never says anything. He looks the most like you of anyone in my daily life. Dear Dr. Bethune, the first time I saw him I found his appearance arresting. Later I found out Bob was of the same opinion. “He knows he looks like Dr. Bethune,” he said.

  He also told me that this silent neighbour had once been very talkative, and had once participated in the wars between the neighbours. He had a beautiful voice. He was once a member of the most famous amateur choir in the city, singing tenor. But in the winter before I moved into the building, two tragedies befell him. First his eighteen-year-old daughter committed suicide two years after running off with a drug addict who was even older than he was at the time. Then, the day after her funeral, his wife and his son were hit by a car when they were crossing the street. His son died instantly, and his wife died after a week in a coma. After handling the funeral, this once talkative man went to Miami and lived with his elder sister for a year. Nobody had heard him speak since he came back.

  This man’s story brings back a lot of memories for me. I don’t know why your life was surrounded by so much death and insanity, or how you got involved with so many suicides and madmen. Dear Dr. Bethune, I would really like to know why and how. Only if could I find this out might I be able to finish writing your biography. But it’s all so hard to believe, that readers would assume I’d written a novel.