Dr. Bethune's Children Read online

  I sometimes ask myself the same kind of question. I am certain that my life in China would not have come to a sudden, absurd ending had Yinyin not died what they insisted on calling an “accidental death.” I’m still not sure why Yinyin was so determined to go out for a breath of fresh air so late at night. Indeed, she and the child both needed fresh air. But that night, that historic night, unforgettable and unforgivable, the air in Beijing—saturated with despair, hate, and terror—was anything but fresh. She should have known this. She should have known this ever since the day she saw the fortune teller.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, you might find it difficult to understand how that evening influenced the lives of hundreds of millions of your children. That might have been the darkest night of our lives. It has shadowed us ever since. Now I believe that suicide allowed Yangyang freedom from the inevitability of fear that Dr. Bethune’s other children have had to bear. His choice was a way of maintaining his dignity.

  That evening, three bullets hit Yinyin. The one in the belly hit the child she had been carrying in her womb for three months.

  I’ve never talked to Claude about Yangyang and Yinyin. Nor have I ever responded to his question about why I left China and why I’m here. Dear Dr. Bethune, now I know that in a certain sense my coming to Montreal was your homecoming. It was you bringing your child back to your home soil.

  A Terrible Accident

  Dear Dr. Bethune, of all the many events of 1989, you would have found the fall of the Berlin Wall especially shocking. The Berlin Wall was a symbol of the Cold War, and its fall a symbol of the end of the Cold War and the failure of socialism. But the new China, which your great friend founded, escaped this disaster in its own way. Almost twenty years have passed since the year of the triumph of liberal capitalism, and China is still ruled by the Communist Party. Who really cares about this? More and more Westerners come to China these days, “making light of travelling thousands of miles,” but unlike you, they do so for profit or pleasure. Do you still remember what Bob said about China? He said China is the largest capitalist country under the rule of a communist party. He may be right.

  For Montreal,1989 was also unforgettable year, the year of the December 6 massacre. All the victims were women, all young. They died on the same day, on the same evening, and in the same moment. They were not killed by accident. The man who killed them was a madman, but he knew what he was doing. He hated women, so he shot them. Unlike him, the ones who killed Yinyin “by accident” did not know what they were doing, even though none of them were crazy. There are a lot of ironic contrasts in history.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, if you had still been alive, what would your reaction to this tragedy have been? You loved women. You may have hurt them psychologically just like you were hurt by them psychologically, but you would never have hurt them physically. Women often upset you, but they were also lovable in a lot of ways, and you did love them. You hoped the woman you loved would love you back, but this often was not the case. You never seemed to be able to get along with them. What was the problem between you and the woman you married and divorced twice? What went wrong between you and the woman who could see why you must go to China?

  Dear Dr. Bethune, to have your child discuss women with you must make you feel that time that is like an arrow. So let us continue this discussion. Living in China must have been very different from living in Spain. You were separated from the women around you by the barrier of language. The Politics of Passion is the title of a fine collection of your writing, but in the Wutai Mountains, your passion for life could not be united with your passion for politics. A perfect case of alienation! Sometimes, like Bob, I wonder about your relationships with women. Did you think of the Swedish blonde you bedded in Spain when you were suffering from insomnia in China? A declassified Communist International file shows that she might have been a fascist spy. When you made love with her, could you feel her hostility? And if you knew she was an enemy, how could you justify making love with her? What about treating a wounded Japanese soldier? Does this kind of charitable love contradict revolutionary humanitarianism? Or is it the apotheosis of revolutionary humanitarianism?

  At the time, we had no idea about the women in your life—we didn’t even know there had been women in your life, let alone how many. In our China, the private lives of great revolutionaries were national secrets, highly confidential. To release or gossip about them was counter- revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution. We never thought that, in addition to being a doctor and a revolutionary, you were a man of great sexual vitality and charm. The first time I heard anything about your private life was on the train from Hankou to Beijing when Yinyin and I met that professor of politics from McGill. And not until I buried myself in your archives did I discover the depth and breadth of your private life. How does it make a child of Dr. Bethune feel to peer into his father’s intimate affairs?

  The impression I got from your papers is that you changed the direction of your life not of your own accord but because of the woman you loved. The short letter you wrote to your “Pony” when you were on the steamer bound for Hong Kong deepened this impression. You said that she could see why you must go to China. This must implies a fateful relationship either with China or with her, and I now feel the latter is more likely. Which is to say, the reason you must go to China is a secret between you and your lover. Or rather it is yuanfen. Or rather it is the end of yuanfen. It was this mystery of must that gave birth to all Dr. Bethune’s numberless children.

  I discovered Place du 6-décembre-1989 unexpectedly. It was a gloomy Saturday. I was eating dinner with my girlfriend at the same Vietnamese restaurant I later visited with my parents. After we ordered, I told her that the colour of the new dress she had bought was pretty. “Who are you remembering now?” she asked. “As soon as I heard your compliment I knew it wasn’t for me.”

  Her insight surprised me. Could I be speaking to Yinyin? Like a refugee seeking asylum in the past? Maybe she was right. At any rate, she was extremely unhappy. She looked around for a while and then talked again about a Chinese classmate in high school who was academically gifted but dowdy. For her, that Chinese classmate was emblematic of all Chinese women. I found this insufferable and said nothing more.

  When we left the restaurant, I proposed going to the nearby park.

  Again, this turned out to be an inappropriate proposal. “If you want to, go,” she said coldly. “I’m tired.”

  I suggested going home together.

  That wasn’t the right thing to say, either. “If you want to go home, go alone.” She didn’t even look at me, just walked off in the opposite direction.

  I do know why I let myself get tortured like this—tortured by her, tortured by loneliness and despair. It was all because of Yinyin. But Yinyin never up and left me like this, except that last time when she left me forever. I walked alone towards the Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, the largest cemetery in Montreal, wanting to walk among the spirits and hoping that Yinyin, having followed me to Montreal, might be among their number.

  About a hundred metres from the cemetery, I happened upon Place du 6-décembre-1989. I was attracted by what appeared to be carvings shaped like tree stumps that were arranged in two rows facing a central walkway, but each with its own path at a right angle from the main one. If I could look down from above, I imagined, the promenade would look like a huge fallen leaf resting against the earth. I counted fourteen stumps. Then I noticed that on every shape was a letter, the first letter of the name of a dead woman; and the rest of the letters arranged along the path. Those fourteen women died the year Yinyin died. More shockingly, their dates of birth were very close together. Two of them were born the same year as Yinyin, and one in the same year as Yangyang and I. This is to say that if those dead women had been living in China, they would have been Dr. Bethune’s children.

  My discovery made me extremely sad. I sat down on the bench at the edge of the pr
omenade, and my tears flowed down onto the backs of my hands. I could see Yinyin and me in our room in Beijing again, a room about twelve metres square. That was our home. And I returned to the evening on which I held her wake. That whole evening, I could clearly feel her presence, but I couldn’t get any closer to her death. She sat opposite me. Between us, a flickering candle. We sat speechless. I did not dare to reach out and touch her. I was afraid that my fingers would sully her existence. Sitting on the edge of the promenade now, I had the same feeling of her presence. I could clearly feel that she was living in this city, waiting for me, waiting for us to reunite. In the ensuing years, this thought has become more and more deeply embedded in my life, in my body.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, am I crazy to want to reunite with a wife who died so many years ago? This crazy notion might be the deepest reason I’ve chosen to tell you about Dr. Bethune’s children. Memory is the way I welcomed Yinyin to Montreal as well as a way to set myself free. From that day, I decided not to have another relationship with a woman. I was thankful to my girlfriend for her indifference. Yes, it was all because of Yinyin. I still loved her. I’d never stopped loving her. I believed my love for her would allow us to reunite in a foreign land.

  Going home (actually I never considered the apartment my home), I decided to end the relationship with my girlfriend. I also decided to go back to my research and writing, which had been interrupted by Yinyin’s death. This was the way I would resume my life with Yinyin. This was how I would welcome her back.

  But as you already know, dear Dr. Bethune, it was my girlfriend who ended our relationship. Yes, it’s true. I did not break up with her that evening. Blame the injunction against thoughts of self that I had memorized in your memorial as a boy. I thought it would somehow be self-serving to end the relationship, so I kept on putting it off, putting it off until she said it. It was humiliating, but I was grateful. I agreed. I moved into my current apartment tower near Place du 6-décembre-1989.

  Close to the largest cemetery in Montreal and with all the windows facing the scenery of death, my apartment is a perfect place for a historian. But my father started to complain about the fengshui as soon as he arrived. “No wonder you haven’t found a woman who is willing to live with you,” my mother chimed in. I did not respond. I did not want to force them to accept that my life is not only heading toward death but also comes from death, that death is my life. This is where I belong, I thought when I first entered the apartment. Through the windows that face the cemetery, I can see another world, the world of Yinyin and Yangyang, the world of my eternal companions.

  I did not volunteer to take my parents to Place du 6-décembre-1989. I deliberately avoided it. I wanted neither that sensitive year nor the sensitive topic of death to start my mother sighing with regret. But one morning, when she was strolling back to the apartment, my mother did ask about the little park. “Is it a part of the cemetery?” She and my father had guessed that each stump was a tombstone and the numbers on the ground beside each stump were years. The year of birth and the year of death. And they thought it strange that all of those people should have died in the same year.

  I told them it was a special cemetery, and those people not only died in the same year but on the same day, the same evening, even in the same moment.

  My reply shocked my mother. “Who were they?” she asked. “Some were younger than you.”

  I believed that she had noticed that they all had died in the same year as Yinyin, and that two of them were born in the same year as Yinyin. Of course, she would never reveal the association she had made. “And they were all women,” I said meaningfully.

  This new detail seemed to provoke my mother. But she did not react in any particular way, besides asking what happened. “I mean, their deaths were on the same date,” she said.

  I knew that she was intentionally avoiding the fact that they had died in 1989.

  I stared at her sadly. “It was a terrible accident,” I said. “Just like…” I almost mentioned Yinyin’s death. But I did not want to upset my mother any further. Or myself. I did not want to hear her insult Yinyin again.

  “What accident?” my mother kept asking. “Was it a car accident, a plane accident?”

  I did not want to keep on talking to my mother. Because suddenly Yinyin appeared before my eyes. I could not see her face, and I assumed she would approach, but she did not. I wanted her to tell me about the last few minutes of her life. She closed the door, left the compound in which we lived, turned right and left. When she reached Changan Street, she hesitated before turning towards Tiananmen Square. She kept walking, walking into the darkness, then stopped, put her right hand on her stomach and took a deep breath of that tainted air. I don’t know why she insisted on going out so late. That will always remain a mystery. There was no need for her to become part of that night, to pay that kind of price for the sake of history.

  “What accident?” my mother repeated impatiently. “What was so terrible about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was still staring at Yinyin’s hazy figure. I suddenly thought of Hamlet meeting his father’s spirit. “I don’t know how you spent the last few minutes of your life,” I murmured. “Can you tell me?”

  Yinyin did not reply. At the sound of my mother’s voice, she vanished into a layer of mist, which quickly dissipated.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” my mother said. “I know that you just don’t want to let me know.”

  In despair, I watched Yinyin disappear. “Maybe it was an earthquake,” I said deliberately.

  “What does maybe mean?” my mother asked, angry. Obviously she knew why I would mention an earthquake.

  To this city, to the entire country even, that tragedy was like a violent earthquake.

  A Miracle

  Dear Dr. Bethune, when you were young, passionate young people went abroad to participate in war. You were only twenty-five years old when you first went, and World War I left scars on your pride and glory. But about fifty years after you left the world, passionate Chinese young people dreamed of going to a more developed country to study. Can these two passions be compared? Is one better than the other?

  Just as you left your country, many of your children were preparing to leave China. We admired our siblings who got scholarships to study in North America, Europe, even Singapore and Japan. Unlike you, they were not going to help the countries they went to. They wanted to get help from those countries instead. By the 1980s, the children of Dr. Bethune had changed. Their slogan was “Everyone is for me, and I am for everyone.” Utter devotion to others without any thought of self no longer applied.

  Yinyin and I were not as enthusiastic about going abroad as our siblings, though we did occasionally raise the possibility. This is how I discovered Yinyin’s interest in Montreal.

  Yinyin said she had a mysterious yuanfen, a predestined relationship, with Montreal. The fact that I live in this city today is surely a continuation of this relationship. To me, this yuanfen has even become a blood relationship. Yinyin’s blood, our child’s blood. It was blood that brought me here.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, do you still remember the baby’s glove I mentioned in my letter about Claude, the separatist? When I went skating on Beaver Lake on Mount Royal, I heard a familiar voice calling me. Turning to look, I saw Yinyin standing on the shore of the lake. But just as I was about to skate toward her, she vanished. This was the first time I considered the possibility that Yinyin had followed me to Montreal. When I skated to where she had been standing, I found a baby’s glove on the ice. The blood on the glove hit me hard. I knelt down on the ice, trembling and sobbing. This was a testament to the yuanfen between Yinyin and me.

  This yuanfen inexplicably led to a miracle about four weeks before I went to Emergency to get relief from my migraine. And I promised right at the outset that I would tell you why I swung by the supermarket on the way home from the hospital. Now
let me tell you, dear Dr. Bethune: I went there for a miracle.

  The miracle appeared in the form of the cashier, or rather her profile. I did not know how long she had worked in the supermarket. I was standing in the shortest line, holding a couple of boxes of oats. I dropped them to the floor when I saw her, but then picked them up again and selected the line farthest away from her. But my attention was totally concentrated on her, and I kept on changing position so as not to lose sight of her. I wanted to get a clear look at her before she had a chance to notice me. “Impossible!” I said to myself. “It’s totally impossible!” It was a denial that was full of gratitude.

  She must have noticed my attention, because her movements became a bit awkward. She even started to blush, and in such a familiar way.

  I did not dare go over to her. I was still wondering whether it was possible. What was going on? Was I losing my mind?

  On the following Saturday, I dreamt a strange dream, that we were lying in my bed, the cashier and I. I was on my side observing her carefully. Now I was a total believer in the miracle. She was Yinyin. I mean, she was Yinyin herself, not an avatar. Her skin was Yinyin’s skin and her figure Yinyin’s figure. Even the little scar on her chin was there. Yinyin, I said to her softly. She smiled Yinyin’s characteristic smile.

  The next day, there were no people in her line. I still did not dare to pay for my groceries there, but I made a great leap forward by going to the next line over. When I was paying, I stared at her, not at the cashier in front of me. She was looking at her fingers, bored. That was a posture that I had not seen in almost twenty years but which was still so familiar. Yinyin! I called silently.