The Secret Listener Yuan-Tsung Chen

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The Secret Listener
The Secret Listener
An Ingenue in Mao’s Court
YUAN-TSUNG CHEN
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Yuan-tsung Chen 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing
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agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition
on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–757334–1
eISBN 978–0–19–757336–5
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197573341.001.0001
To my granddaughter Erita, and my grandson Jack Jr. with
love
 Contents

Acknowledgments
A Note on Dialogue and Sources

Prologue: Opening Shot

PART I. BEFORE 1949

1. My Family and Myself
2. My First Affair
3. My Perilous Girlhood
4. Stumbling into a Larger World
5. Breaking Away

PART II. AFTER 1949

6. In Mao’s Beijing
7. Outside the Great Wall, by the Blue Danube
8. I Felt It Was Me on Trial
9. A Purge in Reverse
10. The Reverse of the Reverse: The Anti-Rightist Campaign

PART III. LEAPING FORWARD INTO THE ABYSS

11. From the Magic Circle into the Great Famine
12. A VIP (Very Important Pig)
13. From Black Market to Fake Bumper Harvest
14. Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

PART IV. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

15. The Mob Rule
16. The Mob Rule Continued
17. Intrigues in a Slum House
18. Forced into Exile and Fighting Back
Epilogue

Index
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my friend Michael Denneny, an excellent editor,

who smoothed the first draft of my manuscript. Thanks also go to
Andrew Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at
Columbia University, and Perry Link, Emeritus Professor of East
Asian Studies at Princeton and Chancellorial Chair Professor for
Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California, Riverside,
for their encouragement. Professor Nathan put me in touch with Amy
and Peter Bernstein, literary agents par excellence. Peter and Amy
introduced me to Richard Bernstein. Richard (no relation to Peter
and Amy), a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times
and Time magazine and the author of several notable books on
China, was my ideal editor. Working with the three Bernsteins,
writing this book became a wondrous journey during which I
discovered the potential in my manuscript as well as in myself that I
had not been entirely aware of before. I could not have written this
memoir without them.
I also wish to thank the professional and resourceful team at
Oxford University Press, in particular Dave McBride and Emily
Mackenzie, who guided me through the submission process with
understanding and patience, for bringing the book to life.
Meanwhile I want to thank Helen Nicholson, Production Editor,
and her team at Newgen, for their professionalism and
thoroughness.
And now at long last I have the opportunity to express openly,
freely my gratitude to my comrades in tribulation who went through
thick and thin with me.
 A Note on Dialogue and Sources

I’m fortunate to live in an apartment facing one of the prettiest bays

in Hong Kong. I always love to be close to the sea. It inspires me; it
prompts my thoughts and my recollections. The apartment was a
good place to compose this memoir. As I gazed out my window,
people who had touched my life in one way or another arose vividly
in my mind’s eye and spoke to me in their own voices, as I have
spoken in mine. But what we said we said a long time ago, going
back more than eighty years, when I was six years old, and after all
that time, I can’t be sure that the dialogue I’ve reproduced here
represents exactly, word for word, what was spoken. But the words
I’ve put between quotation marks are what I remember, and I believe
I’ve captured in spirit, if not with verbatim accuracy, what was
actually said.
I did not draw only on my memory. I read many books that helped
me to recall what happened. To give one example, when I wrote
about Zhou Enlai, I had three books at hand on my desk: (1) Zhou
Enlai, written by Dick Wilson and published by Viking Penguin, New
York, 1984; (2) The Biography of Zhou Enlai, written by the
Department of Documentary Studies of the Central Committee of the
Chinese Communist Party and published by its own press, Beijing,
1998; and (3) The Comprehensive Biography of Mao Zedong, written
by Xin Ziling（辛子陵）, who had worked in the Party Archive, and
published by Li Wen Publishing House（利文出版社）, Hong Kong,
1993.
To give another example, the birth and rise of the Chinese
Communist Party had a great deal to do with the “Soviet Russian–
Oriented Policy” designed by Eugene Chen, father of my late
husband, Jack, for Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Nationalist Party
(i.e., Kuomintang). When I wrote about the relationship between the
Chen family and the Chinese Communist Party, I drew on some
information from two books, Inside the Cultural Revolution, written by
Jack Chen with my help and published by Macmillan, New York,
1975; and Return to the Middle Kingdom, written by Yuan-tsung
Chen and published by Union Square Press of Sterling Publishing
Company, New York, 2008.
 Prologue
Opening Shot

I planned to write my memoir in Hong Kong, where I moved from the

Berkeley Hills in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010, but it was only
a few years later that new events made clear to me what my
approach to my own experience needed to be. In 2015, several
Hong Kong publishers, which had sold books unflattering to the
reigning Communist Party, were seized by China’s all-powerful
Ministry of Public Security and brought across the border into
Mainland China. These events opened old wounds, not only mine
but also those of others who had fled to Hong Kong, then a British
colony, before it was restored to China in 1997. Large numbers of
Hong Kongers, many of them students, stepped forward and
protested. The Party blamed the schools for not having taught them
enough “patriotism.” The textbooks, particularly the ones about
recent history, would be rewritten.
And so, for example, on January 11, 2018, the South China
Morning Post reported that the People’s Education Press in Beijing
had published a new account of the Cultural Revolution (1966–
1976), the most violent of Mao Zedong’s violent purges, that would
be read by all middle-school students. This new “patriotic” history
rewrote what none other than China’s paramount leader, Deng
Xiaoping, had described as a ten-year-long cataclysm (Hao Jie—浩
劫 ) in which 1.7 million people perished, according to the official
death toll. The dead had wives or husbands, children or parents,
siblings or cousins, lovers or friends, so how many more lives were
ruined? That same event in the new version became the ten years of
“arduous exploration and development achievement.”
This Orwellian rewriting of a history that I lived myself propelled
me to look deeper into my memory. Much that had lain dormant
there began to stir, and I understood that what was taking place
around me now in Hong Kong had its prototype in the 1950s, ’60s,
and ’70s in China, exactly the periods I intended to cover in my
memoir.
Perhaps I should try to explain this in more concrete terms. I was
stunned by the new “patriotic” history for middle-school students, but
paradoxically also inspired by it, because it told me how to
remember events that I had experienced. Half a century ago I
attended a giant rally in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. A million
middle-school students were there, in worshipful attendance on the
Chinese demigod, Mao Zedong, who stood on the Gate of Heavenly
Peace and rallied China’s young people to his violent and disastrous
cause. I went with a group from my neighborhood association and
stood on the edge of the crowd. I saw the staged performance of a
young acolyte, about twelve or thirteen years old, sliding a Red
Guard armband on Mao’s sleeve, Mao’s acceptance of which
signified his moral responsibility for the atrocities that these
impressionable young people were soon to commit in his name.
They beat, humiliated, and robbed whatever, wherever, and
whomever they identified as feudal and bourgeois. They charged
tens of thousands of people with sedition and treason, or just with
insufficient admiration for Mao, and the courts and police went along
with them, sending their victims to jail or labor camp. This horror was
what Deng acknowledged in likening the Cultural Revolution to a
cataclysm. Now it would all be hidden under the insipid and
obscurantist phrase “the decade of arduous exploration and
development achievement” that the mainland’s education authorities
were using to indoctrinate a new generation of Chinese young
people. Whoever was behind the rewriting of Mao’s last purge
shared the Maoist mentality, the same impulse to dictate what young
people should know and what they should believe. They have at
their disposal the giant megaphones of their propaganda apparatus,
which is perhaps the largest and wealthiest state machinery in
history for swaying public opinion, and I, just a retiree in the twilight
of her years, living quietly and obscurely in a tiny apartment in Hong
Kong, felt a familiar sense of outrage and powerlessness.
But even as I write these words, history has been taking place
around me. In June 2019, two million Hong Kong people took to the
streets, protesting against an extradition law that, if passed in the
Legislative Council, many Hong Kongers feared, would enable
Beijing to extradite anyone whom they decided had offended them.
The protests effectively killed the proposed law. But more recently,
China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, passed a new
National Security Law that in letter and in spirit, many Hong Kongers
argued, was not consistent with the one-country, two-systems
principle that was supposed to guide China’s takeover of Hong Kong
for fifty years.
I, a bystander, recognized it all, having lived through so many
events in China itself during which the Communist Party
demonstrated its obsession with any kind of waywardness, much
less organized opposition. I was born in 1929 in Shanghai, then the
Paris of the East, the greatest metropolis of China, a port city ranked
with London, New York, and Amsterdam. My middle-class family was
not rich, but we were well connected. My mother was a worldly,
clever, socially ambitious woman, my father a banker and a member
of the then-ruling Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. I was slated to
have a privileged, happy, high-society life in a modernizing, newly
united China. My mother groomed me to be a player who could
compete with other young women for eligible bachelors. She
invested in my education. Starting from the age of four, I went to an
elite, bilingual private school, so that I became fluent and literate in
both Chinese and English.
But my childhood was rudely interrupted, my expectations swept
away by the tremendous tidal wave that was China’s midcentury
history. There was the Japanese invasion of 1937, which forced my
family into exile; following that came four years of civil war, at the
end of which Mao Zedong’s Communists defeated the Kuomintang,
took power, then, slowly at first, more rapidly later on, enacted his
radical vision, involving upheavals in the countryside, the purges of
middle-class writers, professors, and thinkers in the cities. I saw the
denunciation meetings, the kangaroo courts, the fake investigations
of fake ideological crimes, the suicides of good people unable to
endure the shame and the humiliation of it all. I had a modest job in
the Scenario Department of China’s Central Film Bureau, where I
witnessed the destruction of some of my country’s leading cultural
lights. I saw how people coped, or tried to; I exchanged whispered
views with them on what to do, how to avoid the Maoist juggernaut.
An aspiring writer myself, I burned a manuscript that I had hoped
would initiate a glorious literary career. I’m speaking here of the
1950s, before the worst of Mao’s purges came, the so-called Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but that came too, bringing the
Maoist horror to new levels. I got married just before that, to a
privileged overseas Chinese man, and gave birth to my son. When,
despite his privileges, my husband fell prey to the Red Guard mob,
we were able—with the help of China’s premier, Zhou Enlai—to
move to Hong Kong, where we arrived in 1971.
And now I am back, after many years in the United States, where
I was a librarian assistant at the University of California, Berkeley’s
East Asiatic Library. I enjoy a peaceful life here in a small apartment
facing the usually calm sea. And yet I feel history encroaching again
when the Party’s Maoist imperative is to make everybody think the
“correct” way. For me, the message is that, yes, many things seem
different, but the political fundamentals remain the same. Mao’s giant
mausoleum still stands in the middle of Tiananmen Square. His
portrait hangs at the top of the great gate leading into the Forbidden
City, receiving adulation and obeisance, just as he himself did on
that day more than fifty years ago when he received his Red Guard
armband.
I have had the good fortune to have lived a long life as a witness
to both the private and public sides of China’s turbulent history. I
hope in my small way to serve the cause of truth at a time when it is
foolhardy to do so. To be honest, I do this in fear. I am a Hong Kong
writer, and I hope to give my memories the kind of immediacy and
currency that only a Hong Kong writer can. And yet at the same time,
what I have to say may make me susceptible to the rules being
transplanted from the mainland even as I write these words.
I hope not. We’ll see.
 PART I
BEFORE 1949
 1
My Family and Myself

Luck came knocking on our door when I was a small child. Father’s
friend, Mr. Hsu, had become president of the Post Bank. Even to this
day I don’t know why it was called the Post Bank; probably it was
somehow connected to the national Post Office. Mr. Hsu invited my
father to be the head of its Wuhan branch. Wuhan is a large area on
the Yangzi River, consisting of three important cities in central China.
The monthly salary was six hundred silver dollars, which, in 1933,
was twenty times the income of a regular middle-class household. In
addition, Father would be awarded a considerable bonus at year’s
end.
Furthermore, we lived rent-free. The bank was an imposing
edifice in Hankou. The first floor was the office; the second was
divided into several apartments accommodating a few top
employees’ families, ours being the biggest. We had a large living
room with a dining area and four bedrooms. Adjoining the master
bedroom was Father’s study. Our family was of medium size, five
members in total: my father, Chen Shizhen; my mother, Jin Tongying;
my younger brother, Yuan-zhang; my younger sister, Yuan-chi; and
me. Yuan-tsung means “First Pearl.”
Not long after my father arrived at his new office, Mr. Hsu came to
Hankou, the most important of the three major cities in Wuhan, to
inspect the regional business. My father held a banquet in his honor.
Like my father, Mr. Hsu had returned from the United States after
having graduated from Columbia University. He was a modern type
and he enjoyed the company of modern women, also, of course,
pretty women. My mother, a considerate hostess, did not disappoint
him. Among her female guests two were A-list celebrities. One was
the wife of the mayor, as cute as a button, and another was a woman
famous for her boldness. She drove a car and rode horseback. That
was no mean feat for a woman at that time in China.
The banquet, the first that my mother was to host, was to be held
in the best restaurant at Hankou Central. And it was my first banquet
as well, since I got taken along, all dressed up, when I wouldn’t let
my mother leave the apartment without me. Fortunately for me,
taking a child to a banquet was not contrary to the prevailing
etiquette. The gathering left no impression on me, nor did Mr. Hsu,
who was reputedly a handsome man. But to my mother it was
unforgettable. It was such a glorious occasion that she was never
tired of recalling it, especially later, when our family went down in the
world.
“You left a deep impression on Mr. Hsu,” she told me later. “He
praised you to the skies and called you a rising star. ‘It will be a great
pleasure to sit next to her, enjoying her warm glowing smile.’ That’s
what he said to me.”
A casual compliment from such a VIP led Mother to see a
potential in me that she hadn’t glimpsed before, and this in turn led
her to begin planning my future in earnest. She would send me to
Shanghai’s St. Mary’s Hall, a sort of finishing school for privileged
girls. She had made a survey and found that quite a few of the
school’s alumnae had married rich, powerful men and become
Flowers of Society, socialites who were the life of fashionable
parties, written about by popular columnists in newspapers or
magazines. The textbooks, except for the one used in Chinese-
language class, were American, which also appealed to my mother,
since English was the fashionable language then, just as French was
spoken by the czarist elites in Russia during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
But St. Mary’s Hall lay a few years ahead. First, Mother chose an
expensive, exclusive kindergarten for me. It was called St. Joseph’s
Kindergarten, and I started there at the age of four. As at St. Mary’s
Hall, English was the language of instruction, English culture and
English etiquette the accepted standards. By all accounts I was a
good student there.
“Mrs. Chen, how fate smiles on you!” my mother’s friends would
tell her. “A good husband who earns a good salary. A good daughter
who is a credit to you.”
Mother’s dark brown eyes would light up. “I have great plans for
Yuan-tsung,” she would say.
But mother’s luck soon took a downward turn. What caused it was
Father’s addiction to playing mahjong. Mahjong-playing was a
means of socializing with friends and potential friends, a key to what
might be called networking today. It could help to make or unmake a
career, and, sadly, Father’s obsession with it led him to fall into the
latter category. Obsessed with the game, he turned a blind eye to the
maneuvering of his mahjong buddies. He didn’t find out until it was
too late that they had a secret agenda. They made Father feel good.
They made sure Father won, and considerable sums of money could
change hands at the mahjong table. And for Father, winning at the
mahjong table was a welcome relief from his work at his office,
where things did not go well. Everything he wanted to do, it seemed,
met with obstacles, invisible and insurmountable. And so gambling
took up more and more of his time, and he paid less and less
attention to his work. Whispers of disaffection reached Mother’s ear.
“Your father’s mahjong buddies are schemers, you know; they
keep your father at the mahjong table so their partners can steal
without being discovered,” Mother said to me.
“We’ll lock our doors,” I said helpfully.
“They don’t steal from our home.” Mother began to whine. “From
the bank’s warehouse. Some hocus-pocus is going on. I don’t know
exactly what.”
Shaken, Mother warned Father that if he didn’t take tough
measures immediately, he would be in terrible trouble. But she talked
as if to a stone wall.
“You take care of the housekeeping and let me do my business,”
he retorted in a low and hoarse voice.
As Mother continued to nag, he lowered his eyes as though
dozing off.
“His nose, his disastrous nose,” Mother sighed.
That mystified me. My father was a handsome man and his best
feature, everybody agreed, except for his wife, was his nose. It was
a nose like that in a sculpted bust of a Roman senator. Whoever
possessed such a nose was destined to do great things, a
fortuneteller once told my mother. Father’s nose, however, had a
small flaw, Mother explained to me. It was high and straight, but at
the end of the ridge, it went slightly lopsided. Because of that flaw,
Father’s great destiny would be cut short, Mother believed.
Mother had kept her troubles hidden for some time, and then they
came pouring out to me. Why me? I was only six years old; there
wasn’t much I could take in, even though I was a precocious child
whom she called her “little old lady.” She needed to talk to someone
who would not gloat and betray her. I was a safe bet and I offered a
sympathetic ear, which was what she really needed.
“We’ll fall on hard times,” she predicted, distressed. She lost
sleep. She had no appetite.
Her doctor suggested a rest cure. She thought of visiting her
parents in the south. They lived in a pastoral town, adjacent to a rice
paddy and a wheat field. The country life and the change of scene
would be good for her health, she felt.
“When I am away, no one can restrain your father,” she said. “He’ll
go haywire.”
“I’ll keep an eye on Father.” I wished to please Mother.
“He won’t listen to you, a child.”
“I’ll ask Lucky to help me.”
“You didn’t tell Lucky what I’ve told you, did you?” Mother asked.
“No, I didn’t and I won’t.”
“If you don’t tell her what is the trouble, how can she help you
prevent it?”
“I can tell Lucky that I don’t like Father going out at night. You’ll be
away, and I want to keep Father home.”
“Yes, you can do that.”
Lucky was our slave girl. She was thirteen, seven years my
senior. When she was about my age, her village had been flooded.
All her family’s belongings had been washed away. Desperate to get
some cash to buy food for his younger children, her father begged
my mother to take her. To be fair to my mother, she had the grace to
refuse the selling and buying of a human being, a common practice
then, although theoretically prohibited by law. She thought of giving
Lucky’s father some money. As she was pondering what to do, he
sank to his knees and turned his angular face upward and begged.
“If you don’t want her, I have nowhere to turn to but a brothel,” he
said.
He was a refugee and a stranger. He earned my mother’s
sympathy, but not her trust. Who knew what he would do if she
simply gave him some money? She couldn’t exclude the possibility
that Lucky might end up in a brothel anyway. But her heart went out
to the little girl, who had an angelic face, and agreed to shelter her.
He asked for ten silver dollars. She gave him twenty, a generous
sum.
“When your situation improves, come and take her back,” Mother
told Lucky’s father. But in the intervening seven years, he had never
returned.
Lucky fared much better than other slave girls in the
neighborhood, who were often like punching bags to their
mistresses. I knew of one slave girl who got beaten so badly that she
was left with an awful swelling on her head and a face that looked to
me as large as a watermelon. Occasionally Lucky would receive a
light slap across her face when she was found stealing, which she
did, but in a small way, one-dollar bills, coins, candies, inexpensive
knickknacks. Nothing of much value.
Then Lucky did something less forgivable a few days before my
mother went on her journey. She saw a pretty comb, a sort of
headdress for old women, that my mother had bought as a gift for
my granny, lying on top of a vanity table. I think Lucky took it almost
automatically, without thinking—a habit she seemed unable to shake
off.
Mother was furious, and she imposed a harsh punishment. Lucky
was locked up in a dim, narrow room behind the kitchen without food
and water. She suffered, and I suffered along with her.
We had grown up together and a strong bond had been formed
between us. Only she knew my secret fear of the dark. Every night
she waited on me while I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and
changed into my nightgown. Unhurried and slow-moving, I tried to
keep her by my side as long as I could.
When she would leave my room, she’d put out the light. Lying in
the dark, I had the strange feeling that I was naked and exposed to
demons hidden near me. One night, my imagination ran away with
me, and I jumped out of bed and crawled under it. I would have
spent the whole night there if Lucky hadn’t come to do her last check
on me and dragged me out.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked with genuine solicitude.
Shivering, I confided in her what I would have felt ashamed and
humiliated admitting to my mother.
“Do you want me to move into your room?” she asked.
“Of course, please do,” I said, joy in my heart. “This bed is big
enough for two.”
“I’ll place my mat beside your bed.”
“The floor is hard, not comfortable,” I objected.
“I’ll get used to it.”
“Why don’t you want to share my bed?”
“Because you are a young lady and I am a slave girl,” she
answered and went to get her bedding.
The warmth exuding from her person permeated my room. The
demons were exorcised. I felt safe. She was lying so close to me.
Just stretching my hand, I could touch her.
“Lucky, I never look on you as a slave girl,” I said, holding her
hand tight in mine.
“I know.”
“You are my best friend, almost a sister.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. If you knew, you’d let me crawl under your
blanket.”
“Then come on in,” she murmured, her words sounding like a
sweet lullaby. I slept through the whole night.
When she was locked away, my nightmares came back.
Overwhelmed, I had to go see her. I knew the key was under the
seat of the kitchen god. In the middle of the night, when the whole
house was asleep, I sneaked into the kitchen and took the key.
When I turned it in the lock, the door opened with a sudden, loud
noise that hit me like a thunderbolt. It worried me that it had
awakened everyone in the whole bank building. Then I thought I
heard quick steps approaching.
No one came. From the open door, I saw something like a human
figure huddled in a corner. I tiptoed over and found Lucky.
 “Lucky, it’s me,” I spoke in a hushed voice.
She didn’t respond. There was a silent moment as our eyes
adjusted to the dimness. Her face was buried in her hands. I gently
took one of her hands and put a small loaf of steamed bread in it.
She wolfed it down, crumbs falling from her mouth. She picked them
up and ate them with the dust.
“Here’s a bottle of water,” I said. “Take it. I have to go.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She struggled to her feet and
threw her arms around me, as if entreating me not to leave her in the
lurch. Thinking of how she had cared for me in the dark, I too wept.
“Lucky, we may get caught if I remain longer.”
She nodded and withdrew.
***
On the eve of her departure, Mother allowed Lucky to walk out of her
makeshift cell. She bounced back quickly. She went on a shopping
spree and bought me a box of glass beads, a small bag of candy,
and a butterfly hairpin.
“Where did the money come from?” I asked her, suspicious. “Are
you at it again?”
“I saved it,” she answered, grinning. With her lips slightly open
and a narrow gap between her strong, white front teeth, she looked
like a child.
“You ought to return the money,” I advised.
“I don’t remember where I took it,” she said, feeling that justified
her. “Look how colorful these beads are. I’m giving them to you to
make a nice necklace. If you wear it, you can fly to the moon.”
“Really?” I asked, intrigued.
“Our cook says so. Every night before she goes to bed, she holds
her necklace and murmurs her wish to it. It will guide her into dreams
and fly her to heaven.”
Our cook was a Roman Catholic. We mistook her rosary for a
necklace. But Lucky swore that she told me the truth. True or not, I
wanted to believe what she said, so slowly and patiently Lucky
helped me finish several necklaces. We hoped that the more
necklaces we wore, the swifter we would fly. We were properly
adorned, ready to pay a visit to the heavenly palace. We stood at an
open window and looked up at the indigo sky.
The moon illuminated the white, filmy clouds that scudded
overhead, seeming to beckon. Lucky and I took a deep breath and
stretched our arms up, as though opening our wings to fly. Suddenly
the ringing of a telephone intruded into our dream. We stared at
each other. We knew what was up without exchanging a word.
Father’s mahjong buddies were calling.
I dashed off and into Father’s room. “Papa, where are you going?”
Father paused for a minute before he replied, “To see my friends.”
He took a jacket off a hanger in the wardrobe.
“Are you going to play mahjong?” I asked, pouting. I was his
favorite child, a pearl in his palm. I could get away with it.
“Could I have a little fun after a whole day’s work?” Father replied
with a question that he thought would quiet me.
“Could we have fun together?”
“Of course, let’s go to your room. I’ll tell you a bedtime story.”
“Wait, I’ll go get Brother,” I said, but I didn’t go to him right away.
First I went to tell Lucky that if Father’s mahjong buddies called
again, she should say he wasn’t home.
My brother, Yuan-zhang, was one year my junior. He was closer
to me than my sister, Yuan-chi, who was just a toddler. I think my
brother was the best-looking of us three siblings. His large eyes had
an earnest look tinged with brooding. His nose, inherited from
Father, had a sculpted appearance but it wasn’t lopsided. I dragged
Yuan-zhang to my room, which Father entered carrying a small dish
of peanuts in each hand. “This is for you,” he said, placing one dish
on my knee, and then turning to my brother, he added, “And this
one’s for you.”
“You eat too,” I said, stuffing a peanut into his mouth.
“I can’t tell you stories with my mouth full.” Father smiled.
“Tell us about your trip to the Tsinghua School at Beijing,” I
suggested.
“You have heard it, I think, a few times.” Father took off his shoes
and hoisted himself onto the bed.
“I want to hear it again,” I said, moving over to let Father sit
between my brother and me.
 “Me too,” Yuan-zhang said.
“I was a country bumpkin. In my sixteen years I had seldom left
my village and had never traveled farther than the county seat.
Tsinghua was a great academic institution, and at that time it almost
exclusively admitted only the children of well-known wealthy families.
It was beyond my dream. But then, you know, things do happen
inexplicably. A distant cousin came to visit, who, as it turned out,
worked in the Tsinghua Admissions Department. A certain number of
places were reserved for children of the staff. So I applied, claiming
to be his nephew, not just a distant relative. And you know what? I
passed the entrance examination!” Though he had told this story
many times, Father glowed with pride.
I kept asking him to tell me more about his school and the old
Beijing. Time dragged on, and I hoped it would keep dragging on,
past the time for him to go to his mahjong engagement. Yuan-zhang
drifted off, and I was on the verge of falling asleep myself when I
caught something in Father’s voice. “. . . I climbed up the hills behind
our village,” he was saying, to nobody in particular. “Standing at the
edge of a shallow precipice, I looked out over the world below me. I
vowed to myself that when I completed my schooling in Beijing, I
would do great things to bring glory to my family and village . . .”
I stared at him, unable to comprehend why his tone was so sad.
His eyes were closed. He didn’t go to mahjong that night. I couldn’t
wait to tell Mother about the clever trick I had played on him.
“I made him talk and talk until he dropped off,” I bragged after she
came home from the country sometime later. “But he seemed sad.”
“Poor man!” Mother said. “He was sad because his dream didn’t
come true, but that was because he lacked self-discipline. Whenever
he met with any difficulty, he gave up. He let himself go. He gambled
in order to numb the pain, he said. But I don’t buy it. It’s the hedonist
in him that is to blame.” Mother sighed in dismay.
“What shall we do?” I asked, perturbed.
“I have never entered a profession. My parents did not think that
was important for a girl. A girl’s career, they told me, was to be her
husband’s helpmate, so whom she chose was important. Your father
was not a bad choice. He just changed. Now I have two daughters. I
want you and your sister to have your own careers. Don’t get me
wrong, I don’t mean a husband is not important. Choose one who
can help to build your career. But don’t repeat my mistake. Will you
promise me that?”
I solemnly gave my word. Mother must have been pretty
desperate to have turned to me for solace. But she couldn’t prevent
the inevitable. Father did lose his job, a terrible blow to her and to
him. What happened was this: There was a scandal about some
cotton that disappeared from the bank’s warehouse. Had it been
stolen? In fact, it was determined that it had gone rotten and had to
be thrown out. Before this occurred, Father’s old boss, Mr. Hsu, had
been transferred and the new boss, hearing of Father’s gambling
addiction, blamed him for the missing cotton and fired him. Mr. Hsu
interceded and Father was allowed to resign. Face was saved.
In 1936, we moved back to Shanghai.
***
Thanks to Mother’s creative accounting—she siphoned off quite a bit
of cash from Father’s income and put it in her bank account—the
family could afford to take out a lease on a townhouse inside a
walled compound within Shanghai’s French Concession. Father
chose a room on the third floor to serve as his study. Books, thick
and heavy and awe-inspiring, were visible through the glass doors of
the bookcases. The room was Father’s sanctum, quiet and secluded.
We children were not allowed into it unless we were sent for.
Father was contemplating his future, and we held our breath
waiting for him to decide what it would be. One day he emerged from
his study to state, with gravity, his intention to write a book, an
important book to push reform in China’s developing industrial
economy. Father had a master’s degree in chemistry from Columbia
University. He would expound, at length, why chemistry was the key
to solving the problems that arose in building a modern industry.
Mother had doubts and did not hesitate to give her unsolicited
advice. “You should look for a job first. That’s more practical.”
“I’ll have as many job offers as I want after I have earned a
reputation as a troubleshooter,” Father countered.
My sympathy was with Father. I loved books. I had already read
children’s books, fairy tales, folklore, and mythologies. They had
worked their magic on me and tempted me to explore Father’s
bookcases. I was positive that I would find in them more amazing
treasures.
Father gave me permission to read and do my homework in his
study after school if I behaved well and did not disturb him. I readily
accepted his terms.
“You like my study?” he asked.
“Yes, Papa.”
“Tell me why?”
I was suddenly too shy to express my feelings for him. I squirmed
for a minute and said tentatively, “I like your bookcases.”
“The bookcases are made of scented wood that repels
bookworms. The books are well kept,” he said, and then turned to
me with a smile. “Come, smell it. How is it?”
“Nice!”
“The bookcases and the books will be yours, you know, part of
your trousseau.”
“I don’t want to get married; I don’t want to leave home,” I said.
“That’s for you to decide in the future. For now, go back to your
daily routine.”
And Father went back to his. A Chinese chessboard was always
on his desk. It was a game for two people to play. One used the
white playing pieces, the other the black ones. Father used both, for
he played both sides. The game was an enormous brainteaser. From
time to time he needed to refer to a book so as to find a way of
making both sides get even with each other, or at least to prevent
one side from losing too much.
The chess game consumed Father’s time and energy just as the
mahjong game had before. This upset mother.
“You know your problem?” she asked him. “You talk too much and
do too little.”
“You have never written a book, and you don’t have the faintest
idea how hard I have to rack my brain,” Father replied. “The
arrangement of words, the arrangement of sentences, the
arrangement of paragraphs, the arrangement of chapters. Thought
has to be paid to every detail. It’s like building a mansion. The
difference is, a mansion is built by many workers, but a book is
produced by one person, the author. His mind works better when it is
stimulated. For me, the stimulus is the chess game.”
“Very well, I’ll get you some stimulus that is not only good for your
head but also for your pocket,” Mother declared seriously. This was,
indeed, not an act of sheer bravado. She had a plan.
As one entered our compound, on the left side there was a short,
narrow lane where three more homes, larger than our townhouse,
stood in a row. One was the residence of Mother’s Uncle Jin, who
mother was determined would help father find a job. “I think you’ll
find him congenial, for his hobby is Chinese chess,” she said. “He
lives in Nanjing most of the time, but he is in Shanghai now to visit
his first wife. I’ll take you to see him.”
“You make him out to be more influential than he really is. He’s
just a secretary to a minister.” Father’s expression of skepticism was
a ruse to avoid appearing henpecked.
“He is a chief secretary and a confidant to the minister. He has a
lot of weight to throw around, believe me.”
Father obliged after some token resistance. I followed closely
behind them. At the front door we were met by the mistress of the
house, the first wife of Mother’s Uncle Jin. Mother put one hand on
my shoulder and pushed me down to bow low to her. A pair of tiny
bound feet in purple silk shoes, a red rose embroidered on top of
each one, peered out at me from under the edge of a long gown that
wrapped around an incongruously elephantine mass of flesh. Uncle
Jin’s first wife led us to the living room. Directly opposite the
entrance, an elderly man in his early sixties sat cross-legged on a
divan. He was dressed in traditional style, wearing black trousers
and a loose-fitting gray jacket over his stooped shoulders.
Grandpa Jin—that was how Mother told me to address him—was
a man of few words. Mother did all the talking while he turned, with
an impassive face, slightly away from her. Mother was getting fretful.
She gave a little twist of her neck and said, “Uncle Jin, you seem
preoccupied. Maybe I’ll come another day to consult you. It doesn’t
take more than five minutes to walk from my house. Living close to
you, I pray your good luck will trickle down to me.”
Father was embarrassed by Mother’s blunt approach. “Uncle Jin,”
he said, adopting a conciliatory tone. “I have longed to play chess
with you. By playing it with a master, I’ll learn much more than I
would reading all the chess books combined. May I have the
pleasure?”
Grandpa Jin suddenly came to life. In the blink of an eye, he went
to an inner room and came back with two boxes of playing pieces
under his arms and the chessboard in his hands. It surprised me to
see him display the agility of a man half his age.
“Now you cannot tear them apart,” Mother said to me, very
pleased.
Moreover, Father soon had a new job. I’m not sure whether it was
in the Ministry of Communication or the Ministry of Railroads, but I
can say with certainty that it was the ministry to which Grandpa Jin
was chief secretary to the minister. Father had an impressive job
title: special superintendent. “Special” was a word indicating he had
no authority over any regular group of workers or any regular
department. I presume that he did not have much to do. The salary
was high, though not as high as the one he’d received in his
previous job. He was safe from people who wanted to take
advantage of him, and he had the added protection of being under
the wings of his uncle-in-law.
***
But the job also meant that Father had to move to the national
capital, Nanjing, with Grandpa Jin while Mother stayed in Shanghai
with us three children. The reason Mother gave for this separation
was the children’s education. She wanted the best for us, and she
believed the best of everything was in Shanghai. And not just any
part of Shanghai but the part that included the International
Settlement and the French Concession. And it’s true, the old
Shanghai before 1949 was a phenomenon. No one can deny the
importance, the glamour, and the influence that it had in those days.
It was a shooting star that once lit up the skyline of China, whether
one liked it or not.
Shanghai had been a fishing village and a haunt of smugglers
before the Manchu Court, having lost the First Opium War, was
forced to open its doors to the British and other colonialist powers.
Shanghai, near the estuary of the Yangzi River, became a treaty port
in 1843 and soon it became a major trading center. By the turn of the
twentieth century, it was on a par with the giant ports of the world:
New York, London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. Its speedy rise was
largely due to the law and order imposed by British rule in the
foreign-controlled parts of the city, the International Settlement and
the French Concession. It was a sort of reproduction of Western
democracy, not the real thing, but better than nothing and, certainly
for the rising commercial classes, better than the disorder that
prevailed in most of the rest of China, even in the Chinese part of the
city where Chinese warlords and bandit gangs fought endlessly
against one another.
Arriving ocean liners would anchor off the legendary Bund, lined
by a majestic row of bank and corporate buildings and glamorous
hotels. A passenger going ashore would get into a taxi, head west
away from Avenue Edward VII and along Nanjing Road to the realm
governed by the French, where the streets had names like Rue Foch
and Boulevard Joffre. Shanghai had acquired the nickname “the
Paris of the East,” though in actuality, not the entire city but the
French Concession somewhat fit that description.
Twice every month, Father came home over the weekend. I
greeted him joyously, anticipating we’d have fun together. Our
favorite pastime was taking a walk around “the Paris of the East.”
We strolled out of our compound at Pushi Road, turned left, and
reached the corner where our street ended and another street
began. There stood the highest skyscraper of Shanghai, the thirteen-
floor Shanghai Mansions. Turning the corner, we stepped onto a
street lined with trees that, according to some reports, had been
transplanted from Paris proper. Their leaves and branches waved
gracefully in the breeze and threw shadows on the pavement,
touching a row of fancy boutiques. The window dressing was
tastefully done by men who knew the art of arranging and displaying
their commodities. A girl’s red dress dotted with tiny embroidered
white flowers caught my eyes.
“It’s a pretty dress and it’s your size,” Father said, having followed
my gaze.
“Could I just try it on?” I implored.
 Father could not bring his heart to refuse me, but he cautioned,
“It’s expensive and it’s for rich girls. We are not rich.”
“I know. I won’t ask you to buy it.”
“Very well, just have a taste of luxury.”
We went in and the saleswoman helped me put the red dress on.
I looked at my reflection in a tall floor mirror and was amazed by the
change in my appearance.
“It sets you off,” the saleswoman said. “You look as vivacious and
fresh as April.” Her nimble fingers with well-manicured pink nails
adjusted the collar.
“How much?” Father asked the saleswoman.
“Papa—”
Father gestured with his right hand to stop me from protesting.
“You are my princess and I want you to be happy.”
“Mama will not be happy,” I muttered.
When I timidly presented the beautifully wrapped box to Mother,
the price tag spoke loudly of what I didn’t dare tell her. She was
angry at Father’s stupid, sentimental impulse.
“Do you know we cannot afford to squander money on a fancy
dress for a little girl? We only have one income, but we have two
households to maintain, one that I run frugally, the other where you
live in Nanjing. When it comes to money, the second wife of Uncle
Jin is as sharp as a shark. She doesn’t treat you as a close relative,
as family. You are her boarder and she asks you to pay for
everything, the rent, the food, the laundry, all more than she should
ask. Every month we barely manage to make ends meet. Not only
don’t we save, but we also have to draw, now and then, from our
savings for some extra expenses. Had you a moment of pause
before you paid for this dress? I always buy clothing a size larger for
children so they can wear it longer. This dress fits Yuan-tsung now
and she will outgrow it in no time. Before she can show it off, it will
be too small for her.”
Mother exaggerated about the living expenses. Actually she still
managed to put aside some money from Father’s reduced income,
though not as much as before. Father knew this but held his peace.
As it turned out, Mother’s prediction about me was wrong this time.
My wish to show off my red dress was fulfilled, and in a way I was
proud of. A few months later, tagging along with her and my father, I
wore the dress to a party grander than any party I could have
imagined. In the late spring of 1937, Father, as a Kuomintang
(Nationalist Party) member of upper-middle level, received an
invitation from Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Party and the head
of the government in Nanjing. Chiang would preside over an
emergency conference, mobilizing Party members to get ready to
fight back against the expected imminent Japanese invasion. The
invitation specified that the member’s family would be welcome to
attend the party on the opening night of the conference.
“This will be a great opportunity to meet with very important men
and their wives,” Mother said in a voice quivering with excitement.
“I’ll take Yuan-tsung and Yuan-zhang with me. I think it is necessary
for them to learn how to socialize on such an occasion. We’ll
rehearse now, and later on there won’t be any stage fright.”
We arrived at the city of Jiujiang by ship and then were
transported up the mountainside in sedan chairs. We reached the
famous summer resort at the peak of the Lu Mountains in late
afternoon. The Fairy Glen Hotel gleamed white in the sunset. We
followed a bellboy to our suite. We took showers and put on our
best. I wore my red dress, white lace socks, and white shoes. Mother
put on a finishing touch—she pulled my hair back and tied it with a
red bow on top of my head.
“With your hair pulled back, your delicately boned face is left in
fine cameo relief,” she said while turning my head this or that way for
careful inspection. “Someday you’ll know that a girl’s looks will affect
her fate. But don’t count only on beauty. Beauty is a sort of facilitator
that catches people’s eyes. It is up to you to improve your mind, so
you have something inside here”—she tapped both my temples
—“that they think is worth seeing.”
While waiting for Mother to get ready, I walked to the broad
landing outside our suite. Standing behind a large vase of fresh
flowers, I peered down at the guests in the immense hall. Everything
glittered—the ladies’ rings, brooches, earrings, necklaces, bracelets,
and hairpieces, and the gentlemen’s tiepins, cufflinks, and medals. It
all shone under the light of crystal chandeliers. I was dazzled and
humbled, anxious that I would seem pale in the midst of all this
splendor. Suddenly the hopes that I’d entertained for myself in this
charmed circle started to fade.
I was ill at ease. Mother sensed it and admonished me. “This is
not the time nor the occasion for you to be shy of the spotlight.”
My brother hated to make a grand entrance and hid behind
Father. I braced myself, walking down the stairs and into the hall with
my head raised high and my chin up. For an awkward moment
Mother cast about for a familiar face. If she could not blend into the
crowd, all the money she’d spent to go on this trip would be wasted.
Worse, she would be forever haunted by regret over a missed
opportunity.
A thin woman with a hollow chest tossed a welcoming smile in our
direction. Mother recognized her, an old acquaintance whose
husband had become the deputy to the man who had replaced
Father at the Post Bank in Wuhan. Mother had marked them as
turncoats and had vowed never to forgive them. Under the present
circumstance, the vow had to be ignored. I had never seen two
friends so happy at their reunion.
Mother was cordially introduced. Then all of a sudden, the smiles
on their faces faded as their eyes turned to the gate. A middle-aged
man of medium height and in a light gray suit had just entered,
accompanied by a woman.
“Zhu Jiahua, Chiang Kai-shek’s right-hand man,” Mother
murmured under her breath.
“Who is the lady beside him? His wife?” someone asked.
“He and his wife live happily apart. You won’t see them together,”
a cynic said.
“The lady is Mrs. Wu, the famous Phyllis Wu. Her husband is a
director in the Ministry of Agriculture, or something like that, not a
very high position. She is cleverer than he is. She somehow
manages to make him and therefore herself appear as if they’re at
the top—well, maybe more likely close to the top—of society in
Nanjing,” a woman with a big gap of a mouth commented with
malicious glee, but when she turned to see the man and woman
under her review coming our way, a look of obsequiousness crept
into her eyes.
 The man was debonair and gallant, holding Phyllis Wu’s elbow
and walking at a pace as if holding something beautiful and fragile.
In fact, Phyllis Wu was far from delicate. She was tall by the Chinese
standard of those days, about five feet five inches. Her step was firm
and steady. She walked slowly, for she paused frequently to
exchange pleasantries with other guests.
Except for a small diamond engagement ring and a simple
wedding band, she wore no jewelry. Unlike the women decorated
like Christmas trees, she stood out in a simple blue dress. She was
not a beauty. What she had was a way of doing everything with style
and grace. Like a queen. A fairy queen! Cinderella might be a
fictional character to others. To me, she was real. Magic happened in
her life. It would happen in my life. I had a hunch that my fairy queen
would guide me into a world I yearned for. I was dying to attract her
attention. When the couple came by, instead of bowing like the other
children did, I curtsied. Zhu Jiahua responded, half in jest, with a
deep bow, but Phyllis Wu only acknowledged me with a little nod.
What a disappointment! I had to muster all my willpower to keep a
stiff upper lip. I refused to be defeated. I would win her yet.
At the dining table my ears pricked up as I listened to the stories
told about Phyllis Wu. There were two or three seats between these
gossipers and me. I only caught snatches of their conversation, but I
learned a few essential facts nonetheless. Phyllis Wu wasn’t staying
in the hotel proper. She had rented a small villa behind the hotel,
close to a chapel, where she, a devout Christian, would pray at least
twice a day, morning and evening.
Early the next morning I left my room before everybody woke up.
In the lobby I asked the man at the front counter for directions to the
chapel. He drew a map for me and off I went with a spring in my
step. I seemed to be the only pedestrian on a narrow road leading to
a forest, where I saw a clearing. The trees, bushes, and flower beds,
still moist with morning dew, had burst into a riot of color. They
formed a natural fence surrounding several dollhouse-like villas. I hid
myself behind the bushes. Any suspicion that I was prowling around
would spoil my plan of staging a chance encounter, though prowling
around was exactly what I was doing. I did not have long to wait. The
door to one of the villas opened, and a hand in a white lace glove
holding a pink sunshade was revealed. It was she. I quietly slipped
out of the bushes and onto the path ahead of her to the chapel. She
could not accuse me of following her.
“Yuan-tsung.”
She was calling me, and she remembered my name! She hadn’t
overlooked me! A feeling of surprise mixed with joy surged through
me.
“Good morning, Mrs. Wu.”
“Are you going to the chapel?” Phyllis Wu asked.
“Yes, I pray twice a day, in the morning and at night. When the
weather is warm, I pray kneeling down beside my bed. In winter I
pray wrapped in my blanket. That’s wrong. I know that’s wrong, but I
am awfully afraid of cold.”
“We have a very forgiving God,” she said.
“You think He won’t get angry with me?” I asked.
“Make a guess,” she said. Under the pink sunshade, the reflected
sunlight added a blush to her face. Red was a warm color.
“I can’t tell if you are ever bothered by anything,” I said. “You
always seem about to smile.”
We were now at the front door of the chapel. As she folded her
sunshade, she bent toward me and said in a low, confidential voice,
“You’ll notice that the corners of my mouth are not drooping, and
there is just a hint of a smile around my lips. I have cultivated this
hint of a smile because I think that it softens the sharp expression on
my face with its rather pointy nose. This is a secret, and I am only
sharing it with you. Now let’s walk in.”
The chapel was a white-walled house distinguished from its
neighbors only by the cross over its front door.
There were several of last night’s partygoers already praying.
They bowed their heads, but only half closed their eyes, squinting at
the aisle that Phyllis Wu walked down. It seemed that I was not the
only one stalking her. She and I knelt at the front pew right beneath
the pulpit. I had her for a short while, but once the devotions were
over, the others hijacked her. They were her fellow members in the
Young Women’s Christian Association. They did charity work
together under the auspices of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Soong
Mei-ling, the maiden name of Madame Chiang, had come to the
conference with her husband. She would mobilize the women to
support and take part in the resistance war against Japan.
The ladies had a lot to discuss. They pushed me aside and would
soon banish me from Phyllis Wu’s thoughts. I had to find a way to
forge closer links between her and me. My mind was working
furiously. Unconsciously I slowed my pace and lagged behind. I saw
Phyllis Wu craning her neck as if looking for me. Our eyes met. She
smiled at me and stopped under a tree whose trunk was covered
with clusters of moss.
“You are brooding. A penny for your thoughts,” she said.
I looked up, my eyes moistening. For a long moment her eyes
searched my face for clues to my sudden melancholy.
“Parting, you are thinking of our parting. Parting is always sad,”
she sighed, slightly knitting her well-plucked eyebrows.
“I am afraid that I’ll never see you again,” I blurted out.
“I won’t forget you, especially your eyes, which can express your
feelings more eloquently than any words.”
“You can read my face? Then you know I am confused,” I said. An
idea struck me. I recalled some remarks my Bible class teacher had
made: salvaging a lost soul was a missionary’s inalienable right as
well as duty. Last night the gossipers said that Phyllis Wu, like
Madame Chiang Kai-shek, had been raised in a missionary family.
“It’s not difficult. You have a mobile face. You look a little lost.”
“I am not sure if I have incurred God’s wrath,” I mumbled
nervously.
“Our God is all-loving.”
“Will He forgive me if I don’t want to get baptized?” I finally
confessed to the one sin that truly bothered me and that, I feared,
could offend her religious sensibilities.
“Why?” she asked, concerned.
“I don’t want to be different from my family.”
“Are they Buddhists?” There was a faint edge to her voice.
“No, they are not. Putting off baptism is my fault,” I told a little lie,
not wanting to put any blame on my mother. The fact was she
refused to give me permission. She suspected a religious belief
would claim my soul, which, she thought, should be in her custody.
 Phyllis Wu’s friends reached the hotel gate and waited for her.
She consulted her watch and said to me, “We cannot solve this
problem in a brief moment. You know what?” She took out a small
notebook from her handbag and wrote down her address for me.
“You can write me if you have questions that you want to ask me.
We’ll figure them out together.”
 2
My First Affair

In August 1937, less than a month after we came home from the
conference in the Lu Mountains, war with Japan broke out, and
Japanese soldiers marched into the Chinese city of Shanghai.
Nanjing fell immediately afterward. My father had moved with the
government into the interior of the country. My mother thought, as
many residents in the French Concession and International
Settlement did, that the war would stop at their borders, since,
technically, these districts weren’t under Chinese jurisdiction but
were run by the European colonial powers, which were not at war
with Japan. Sooner or later life would return to normal, she thought,
most likely sooner. Mother hated the hullabaloo of moving. Besides,
where could she find another sanctuary like the French Concession?
She would rather stick it out.
In fact, we did stay in our sanctuary for a couple of years, but
everything changed when the Asian war expanded to become part of
a world war. Japan was allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy,
which meant that when, as seemed likely, war broke out between
Germany and France, Japan would also be at war with France, and
then it would be only a matter of time before the Japanese soldiers
marched into the French Concession and British-controlled
International Settlement in Shanghai. That, of course, was exactly
what happened, but Mother became alarmed even before it did.
“I, a woman alone, have to make a decision that will affect you,
your brother, and your sister,” she told me. “The burden is too heavy
for me to carry, and yet I must carry it. There is no one I can shift it
onto. You are my little old lady. Here is something I want to show
you.” She held up two bank books. “I have several thousand in
savings accounts. It’s not a small amount, but it’s no hedge against
inflation.”
“Papa will send money to us,” I said calmly so as to cover my
longing for Father. Mother never said she missed him, but I knew
she did. Her mouth became slightly contorted in grief whenever
Father was mentioned.
“That will be hard if the Japanese bring the war into the French
Concession and International Settlement.”
“Why don’t we join Papa?”
Mother fixed me with a somber gaze. Was she contemplating my
suggestion? The next day Mother took my brother and me to the
bank to see what was inside her safe deposit box. “You two are old
enough to know what we have to survive on.” And she opened the
box. There were documents, insurance policies Father had bought
for us, and a deed to a plot Mother had bought in a town near
Shanghai where she had planned to build a country house. Under
these papers was her jewelry, nothing much, nothing extraordinary,
until Mother enlightened me by producing an emerald ring.
“This is a special green color, green in the morning dew. I wish I
had three of these rings to pass on to my three children,” Mother
said, looking at my brother. Yuan-zhang was more amused by a gold
coin that he was playing with. “You can have that coin. Keep it well;
don’t lose it,” Mother said, pulling him closer to kiss his forehead.
Over his fluffy hair she saw my expectant face. “Come here, let me
kiss you.”
Those were her words, but I could not believe that I had heard
them right. I had a good memory, and I couldn’t recall a single
endearing gesture Mother had ever made to me. I approached her
hesitantly and bashfully, turning up my cheek.
She gave me a cursory peck and said flatly, “You don’t have the
sweet smell of a child.”
I was hurt. It baffled me that I did not know why she hurt me. I had
never found out what I had done to displease Mother so deeply. I
withdrew into myself for a short while. But indulging in self-pity was
not one of my vices. I told myself that if Mother did not like me as a
child, I would prove that she should appreciate me as her “little old
lady,” someone she could confide in and chat with. Her strangely
cold comment did not freeze me. On the contrary, it made my desire
to please her all the more fervent.
We began to discuss escape routes. There were two. The first, an
overland route, was longer, more difficult, and more dangerous than
the second, which was by sea, though of course neither would be
easy. Not surprisingly, we decided on the second option. I cannot
say for certain that British ships were still sailing to and fro between
Shanghai and Hong Kong, but American ships certainly were, and
Mother took that into consideration.
And then there were the Italians. Thank God, they were on our
enemy’s side. Their ships were safe, but tickets on the fabled luxury
liner, Counte Verdi, were hard to find. We waited for a long time until,
finally, we got them, and toward the end of 1938 we said our
farewells and boarded the ship.
The expectation of war did not interfere with the Italians’
merrymaking. The first night on board, we were given a banquet,
followed by a great ball. Mother had to skip it when she got seasick.
We returned to our cabin. I managed to slink out when I heard
Mother breathing rhythmically in her sleep. I did not go back to the
ball. I was too young to be allowed such revelry. I sat in a deck chair,
listening to the music and singing, and imagining the festivities that
had tempted me there. This was a delightful moment when the world
I lived in merged into the world of books I had read. In the far
distance, the dark sea was indistinguishable from the dark sky. At
close range, the sea was in constant motion. The ebb and flow of the
tide played on my imagination. I saw the characters I was familiar
with emerging out of the pages of my books and riding the crest of
the waves, rushing to me and involving me in their romances and
adventures.
On the third day we arrived in Hong Kong. We took a train to
Canton, or perhaps it was a city nearby, where we all fell into
Father’s open arms.
The journey to our destination, the city of Kunming in Yunnan
Province in China’s southwest, was totally different from our voyage
on the Counte Verdi. The only vehicle available to transport us was
an old truck. Material comfort, we could forget.
 For some time the journey was uneventful, and we passengers
dozed as we sat and bumped and shook on our hard, uncomfortable
seats. I could see the glimmer of the taillights of the truck in front and
the whiter glimmer of the headlamps of the truck behind us. Then I
suddenly became aware that the truck was not moving and that a
pale light suffused the sky. Looking into the cabin, I was startled to
see the driver slumped over the steering wheel, fast asleep.
Everyone else in the truck was sleeping too. As the morning grew
brighter, I saw that we were in the middle of a field. I was alarmed to
see drums of gasoline and the word “ammunition” stenciled on the
boxes wedged between us. The stillness was broken by the buzz of
insects. Then I heard a sound that I had come to recognize instantly:
the steady whir of an airplane’s engine. I gave a yell, which startled
everyone to life.
“A Japanese bomber!”
The driver raised his right arm for silence. All could hear that
ominous whir.
“We have fifteen minutes before it comes back,” the driver
muttered and drove off as fast as he could. Gasoline drums,
ammunition boxes, and passengers were flung helter-skelter as he
charged on. By the time the plane was due back, he had parked the
truck under the sagging roof of a ruined house on the edge of what
had once been a village.
The Japanese bomber didn’t come back. The truck started again
and pulled out of the ruins. It jolted slowly through the blasted village,
along the only street that was clear of rubble. White dust covered
everything and rose in a heavy cloud behind us. By then it was broad
daylight but not a soul was to be seen. We stopped on the edge of a
deep ravine on the far side of the village. At the bottom were the
carcasses of several mules still laden with heavy luggage.
“Everybody out!” the driver commanded. “The truck is overweight.
Too much baggage, too many drums, boxes, and passengers. If the
weight isn’t reduced, it may overturn.”
We walked on a path parallel to the road. When we had gone past
the ravine, we were allowed to board again.
***
Kunming was the capital of Yunnan Province, a citadel of the
resistance during the war, which made it a target of Japanese attack.
Many offices had been moved out of the city to escape the bombing.
My father’s office at that time was located in Little Stone Village,
about twenty-five miles outside Kunming. Our new home was among
a long row of small, boxlike houses. In the front there was a short,
gentle slope. Now and then, out our front door I could see an ox
pulling a dilapidated cart whose wheels, under the weight, made a
monotonous, lugubrious sound: “yi ya yi ya ou, yi ya yi ya ou.”
From day one, my mother loathed the place. After she had settled
us in, she tried her best to get us back out again and away from what
she deemed a godforsaken village. She stayed with old friends in
Kunming whom she had known since her Wuhan years when their
husbands were working in the Central Post Office. She still pined for
a return to her golden period when her husband was a prominent
banker and she was at the center of the social scene, and she
thought her friends could somehow arrange that. But they couldn’t,
and her hopes grew dimmer and dimmer as she was given the cold
shoulder, by one person after another.
But the effort she made was not entirely in vain. She gathered
plenty of information and came up with a new idea. The place where
Father was working was the Bureau of the Xu-Kun Railroad, under
the Railroad Ministry. Xu stood for Xuzhou, a city close to
Chongqing, the Nationalists’ wartime capital. Kun stood for Kunming.
Needless to say, the line was a crucial artery inside unoccupied
China, but its importance went beyond that.
By the time the war entered its fourth year, Japan had occupied
all our main ports, Shanghai, Qingdao, Tianjin, and Dalian,
blockading the whole country. To try to break the blockade, the
government planned a new railroad line from Kunming to Burma,
where it would link us with our allies and a potential ally, the
Americans. No Chinese, whether poor or rich, illiterate or educated,
Nationalist or Communist, thought we could win the war without the
backing of American resources and military power. That was the
home truth, like it or not.
The two railroads, one real and the other still a vision, were so
important that a department was specially created to take charge of
them. The man appointed to head this department had the status of
a cabinet minister—for that matter, the status of a double-minister,
since he controlled two large organizations.
Mother, understanding this, desperately tried to gain access to
him. “He can help get your father transferred to the large, posh office
of the Burma-Kunming railroad,” she said to me. One day she came
home, exhausted and pale. She squatted and fumbled for her
slippers under the bed. Suddenly her knees buckled under her. She
lost her balance and fell heavily on the floor. I hastened to help her
struggle to her feet.
“Our Double-Minister Sa is an oddball, a Chinese version of Mr.
Scrooge, arrogant, selfish, and cold,” she grumbled. “He thinks it is
his birthright to look down on us.” Mother had been denied a meeting
with Sa, who had even rebuffed her Uncle Jin’s intervention.
My heart ached for her and I wished that I could share her
burden, but, of course, as an eleven-year-old girl, I couldn’t. I spent
my time reading and exploring my new environment—Little Stone
Village and its surroundings, which, as it happened, were beautiful.
Flowers bloomed throughout the year in what seemed an eternal
spring. The weather was so mild that, even in winter, the creek water
was not too cold for me to dangle my feet in. One day, I walked down
a gentle slope and onto a footpath through the woods that ran
parallel to the creek, whose gentle murmurings gave way to the roar
of a waterfall. There, I watched the water pouring over a low dam like
a sheet of pale green cloth until it burst into a rainbow spray on the
rocks below.
I walked past the falls, and where the footpath widened into a
clearing I sat on a stone bench thinking, “How wonderful. I have this
place to myself.”
“Young lady, may I?” The voice was slightly high-pitched, and it
emerged from a funny face, like that of a squirrel without a
mustache. The man’s small, gentle eyes peered at me from under
two fiercely bushy brows.
I moved over and he sat down. He was dressed as men usually
were at that time, in a dark gray Chinese gown over a pair of dark
gray Western trousers. A patch had been sown on the elbow of his
right sleeve. He probably was a clerk, I figured.
 “I can understand why you are hiding yourself here. This is a
fairyland. It is worth your while running away from your class,” he
said, an impish grin baring his longish teeth.
“I have no class,” I replied. I explained that I was suffering from a
low-grade fever and the doctors had recommended that I stay out of
school for a while. “I study at home. My brother teaches me what he
has learned in school.”
“Your brother is your tutor. Is he patient?”
“He is patient and kind.”
“When I was a child, my parents thought I needed tutoring. I was
not as lucky as you are. My first tutor was short-tempered and a big
bother. When he scolded me, I ran into my mother’s room, where he
couldn’t come after me. He eventually resigned, and my father got
me a new tutor, my mother’s youngest brother. Now when I ran into
my mother’s room, he chased after me and dragged me out from
under the bed.” He chuckled at the memory and paused for a
moment. “I cried to my mother. I remember her gracious profile
clearly to this day. She sat in a chair at the window. Her face glowed
in the sunset. ‘I see your father’s ship is coming this way,’ she said. I
instantly stopped wailing.”
“Your father was a sailor?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he mumbled, leaning forward to scrutinize my face for a
minute before getting up to leave. “I would like to meet you again,”
he said.
“You will. We are living in the same village, and this is a small
place,” I said.
“Sometimes I stay in my cabin overnight,” he mumbled again.
“My home is in a row house that the Railroad Bureau provides for
us,” I said.
***
The next day at noon I came home from the market with our maid to
see a commotion taking place all along the row of houses where we
lived. Some people were weeding or planting in the small plots
attached to each house. Some were embroidering. Some were
knitting. Some were reading. Some were chatting. There was an air
of great expectation and curiosity.
 “Mama, what is happening?” I asked.
“Our big boss, Sa, has come to stay for a few days. Our
neighbors, particularly those who have marriageable daughters, are
keeping a close watch on his movements. He’s a widower, not old,
quite a catch.”
“It’s a pity that your daughter is too young to compete,” Father
said ironically.
“I don’t care for him,” Mother scowled, but she remained at the
window and looked out eagerly.
I saw a man approaching and was taken aback. He was the man
with a squirrel’s face that had sat with me near the waterfall the day
before. Except that man had been easy to talk to; he had a shy
manner and a whimsical smile. This man, with his impassive
expression and stiff bearing, seemed to envelop himself in a shell of
hard inaccessibility. He did not look to either side, but straight ahead.
He must have broken more than a few hearts.
“Mama, I think I have made the acquaintance of Sa, but I’m not
sure,” I said.
Mother grilled me for details, rubbing her nose as she listened,
which was a sign that she was giving the matter very careful thought.
“His wife died. His children are grown up and independent. He is
lonely. There are many people who would love to keep him company.
But in his position he has to be very cautious about letting into his
personal life anyone who may want to take advantage of his position.
He is a gentleman, and he knows if he gets close to a girl of
marriageable age or a single woman, he will be under certain
obligations. She or her parents will expect him to propose,” Mother
said.
“His attitude must antagonize a lot of people,” I commented.
“Who cares? They are predators. I don’t blame him for keeping
them at arm’s length. That’s the way I would treat them.”
Mother, it seemed to me, spoke without a hint of awareness of her
own past contribution to the problem she was now trying to solve.
“You are eleven, a safe bet, so he has chosen you as his
companion,” Mother concluded.
“I don’t know if he has chosen me as his companion, but he
certainly was at ease with me. I was friendly to him, not because I
knew who he was. I thought he was a sailor’s son when he told me
his father had worked on a ship—”
“Oh, you silly girl,” Mother said. “I hope he isn’t mad at you for
being so ignorant. His father was one of two great admirals at the
Manchu Court.”
“No wonder he looked at me the way he did. He wanted to see if I
was pretending not to know his pedigree.”
“Well, that’s good. Now he knows you are genuine, and you are
not trying to butter him up,” Mother said.
“I was genuinely ignorant of who he is, but can I continue to be?
We do have a favor to ask him.”
Mother was getting impatient. She thought I was too punctilious.
“Leave that to me. I’ll make him see that we are doing him a favor.
Sa is a lonely bird. We’ll feather a nest for him in our home.” After a
pause, she added, “I know what you’re thinking: The grudge I
harbored against him. That was in the past. We should never let the
past get in the way of doing good work in the present.”
Mother watched, day in and day out, for Sa to reappear, and
when he did several days later, walking from a distance toward our
row of houses, we were ready.
I rushed out, jumped onto the slope in front of our house, and
started playing with a rubber ball. I saw Sa turning the corner,
making his way slowly through the crowd of peasants who milled
about. He noticed me, and the sternness that seemed always to be
on his public face instantly began to melt. My rubber ball accidentally
landed at his feet. He picked it up and handed it to me.
“My little friend, I am glad to see you again!” he exclaimed in a low
voice, only audible to me. “Would you like to join me for a walk?”
“I’ll ask my mother first,” I replied demurely, and turned to look at
her. She gave me a wide smile and a nod.
Sa took me to his cabin. It stood in a woodland fringed by green
fields. Outside its door, clusters of wild white flowers twinkled like tiny
stars beneath the sunlight. Inside, the one room was furnished
simply: a single bed, a desk, three shelves, a closet, a small square
dining table with two chairs.
I lifted the corner of a curtain and exclaimed, “This is like a cabin
in the Black Forest!”
Another random document with
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 BRICK HORIZONS

Here the old map a woodland marks,

With rivers winding through the hills;
And prints remain of spacious parks,
And gabled farms and watermills.

But now we see no fields to reap,

No flowers to welcome sun and rain:
The hillside is a cinder heap,
The river is an inky drain.

The modern town of red brick streets,

Row beyond row, and shelf on shelf,
On one side spreads until it meets
A town as dreary as itself;
And on the other side its arms
Of road and tramway are out-thrust,
And mutilate the fields and farms,
And shame the woods with noise and dust.

Here, from the scenes we love remote,

Dwell half the toilers of the land,—
The soul we think of as a vote,
The heart we speak of as a hand.

Dull sons of a mechanic age

Who claim but miss the rights of man,—
They have no dreams beyond their cage,
They know not of the haunts of Pan.

Here, wandering through mills and mines

And dreary streets each like the last,
Enclosed by brick horizon lines,
I found an island of the past.
A few sad fields, a few old trees,
In that new world of grime and smoke
Told me the time was springtime; these
Alone remembered and awoke.

And in the grass were stars and bells,

The immemorial blossomings
That spring to greet us from the wells
Of Beauty at the heart of things.

A lark sang overhead, its note

Had the same joy with which it fills
The morning, when we hear it float
Through crystal air on thymy hills.

We mar the earth, our modern toil

Defaces old and lovely things;
We soil the stream, we cannot soil
The brightness of Life’s fountain springs.

Here where man’s last progressive aim

Has stamped the green earth with the brand
Of want and greed, and put to shame
Her beauty, and we see the land

With mine and factory and street

Deformed, and filled with dreary lives,—
Here, too, Life’s fountain springs are sweet:
Our venture fails, God’s hope survives.

And in the heart of every child

Born in this brick horizon ring
The flowers of wonderland grow wild,
The birds of El Dorado sing.
 FIRST PATHWAYS

Where were the pathways that your childhood knew?—

In mountain glens? or by the ocean strands?
Or where, beyond the ripening harvest land,
The distant hills were blue?

Where evening sunlight threw a golden haze

Over a mellow city’s walls and towers?
Or where the fields and lanes were bright with flowers,
In quiet woodland ways?

And whether here or there, or east or west,

That place you dwelt in first was holy ground;
Its shelter was the kindest you have found,
Its pathways were the best.

And even in the city’s smoke and mire

I doubt not that a golden light was shed
On those first paths, and that they also led
To lands of heart’s desire.

And where the children in dark alleys penned,

Heard the caged lark sing of the April hills,
Or where they dammed the muddy gutter rills,
Or made a dog their friend;
Or where they gathered, dancing hand in hand,
About the organ man, for them, too, lay
Beyond the dismal alley’s entrance way,
The gates of wonderland.

For ’tis my faith that Earth’s first words are sweet

To all her children,—never a rebuff;
And that we only saw, where ways were rough,
The flowers about our feet.
 HIDDEN PATHS

You see a house of weathered stone,

A pillared gate, a courtyard wide,
And ancient trees that almost hide
The garden wild and overgrown;
You see the sheltering screen of pines
Beyond the farmyard and the fold,
And upland cornfields waving gold
Against the blue horizon lines;
But we of every field and wall
And room are now so much a part,
We seem to touch a living heart
And rather feel than see it all.

You pass the broken arch that spanned

The garden walk,—you note the weeds,
But miss our secret path that leads
To hidden nooks of wonderland;
And, where the faded rooms you mark,
You know not of the ancient spell
That o’er them in the firelight fell
When all the world outside was dark.

Elsewhere is your enchanted ground,

Your secret path, your treasure store;
And those who sojourned here before
Saw marvels we have never found.
For Earth is full of hidden ways
More wondrous than the ways it shows,
And treasures that outnumber those
For which men labour all their days.
 THE PATHS OF THE INFINITE

Have we not marked Earth’s limits, followed its long ways round,
Charted our island world, and seen how the measureless deep
Sunders it, holds it remote, that still in our hearts we keep
A faith in a path that links our shores with a shore unfound?

No quest the venturer waits, no world have we to explore;

But still the voices that called us far over the lands and seas
Whisper of stranger countries and lonelier deeps than these,
In the wind on the hill, and the reeds on the lake, and the wave on the shore.

Never beyond our Earth shall the venturer find a guide:

From the golden light of the stars, but not from the stars, a clue
May fall to the Earth; and the rose of eve and the noonday blue
Veil with celestial beauty the fathomless deeps they hide.

They have their bounds those deeps, and the ways that end are long;
But the soul seeks not for an end,—its infinite paths are near;
Over its unknown seas by the light of a dream we steer,
Through its enchanted isles we sail on an ancient song.

Here, where a man and a maid in the dusk of the evening meet,
Here, where a grave is green and the larks are singing above,
The secret of life everlasting is held in a name that we love,
And the paths of the infinite gleam through the flowers that grow at our
feet.
 A DESERTED HOME

Here where the fields lie lonely and untended,

Once stood the old house grey among the trees,
Once to the hills rolled the waves of the cornland—
Long waves and golden, softer than the sea’s.

Long, long ago has the ploughshare rusted,

Long has the barn stood roofless and forlorn;
But oh! far away are some who still remember
The songs of the young girls binding up the corn.

Here where the windows shone across the darkness,

Here where the stars once watched above the fold,
Still watch the stars, but the sheepfold is empty;
Falls now the rain where the hearth glowed of old.

Here where the leagues of melancholy loughsedge

Moan in the wind round the grey forsaken shore,
Once waved the corn in the mid-month of autumn,
Once sped the dance when the corn was on the floor.
 BEYOND THE FARTHEST HORIZON

We have dreamed dreams beyond our comprehending,

Visions too beautiful to be untrue;
We have seen mysteries that yield no clue,
And sought our goals on ways that have no ending.
We, creatures of the earth,
The lowly born, the mortal, the foredoomed
To spend our fleeting moments on the spot
Wherein to-morrow we shall be entombed,
And hideously rot,—
We have seen loveliness that shall not pass;
We have beheld immortal destinies;
We have seen Heaven and Hell and joined their strife;
Ay, we whose flesh shall perish as the grass
Have flung the passion of the heart that dies
Into the hope of everlasting life.

Oh, miracle of human sight!

That leaps beyond our earthly prison bars
To wander in the pathways of the stars
Across the lone abysses of the night.
Oh, miracle of thought! that still outsweeps
Our vision, and beyond its range surveys
The vistas of interminable ways,
The chasms of unfathomable deeps,
Renewed forevermore, until at last
The endless and the ended alike seem
Impossible, and all becomes a dream;
And from their crazy watch-tower in the vast
Those wild-winged thoughts again to earth descend
To hide from the unfathomed and unknown,
And seek the shelter love has made our own
On homely paths that in a graveyard end.
Oh, miracles of sight and thought and dream!
Y d b t l d t f th t
You do but lead us to a farther gate,
A higher window in the prison wall
That bounds our mortal state:
However far you lift us we must fall.
But lo! remains the miracle supreme,—
That we, whom Death and Change have shown our fate,
We, the chance progeny of Earth and Time,
Should ask for more than Earth and Time create,
And, goalless and without the strength to climb,
Should dare to climb where we were born to grope;
That we the lowly could conceive the great,
Dream in our dust of destinies sublime,
And link our moments to immortal hope.

No lesson of the brain can teach the soul

That ’twas not born to share
A nobler purpose, a sublimer care
Than those which end in paths without a goal;
No disenchantment turn it from the quest
Of something unfulfilled and unpossessed
O’er which no waters of oblivion roll.
But not in flight of thought beyond the stars
Can we escape our mortal prison bars:
There the unfathomable depths remain
Blind alleys of the brain:
The sources of those sudden gleams of light
That merge our finite in the infinite,
We look for there in vain;
For not upon the pathways that are barred
But those left open,—not where the unknown quest
Dismays the soul, but where it offers rest,
Are set those lights that point us heavenward.

So, let us turn to the unfinished task

That earth demands, strive for one hour to keep
A watch with God, nor watching fall asleep,
Before immortal destinies we ask.
Before we seek to share
A larger purpose, a sublimer care,
Let us o’ercome the bondage of our fears,
And fit ourselves to bear
The burden of our few and sinful years.
Ere we would claim a right to comprehend
The meaning of the life that has no end
Let us be faithful to our passing hours,
And read their beauty, and that light pursue
Which gives the dawn its rose, the noon its blue,
And tells its secret to the wayside flowers.

Our eyes that roam the heavens are too dim,

Our faithless hearts too cumbered with our cares
To reach that light; but whoso sees and dares
To follow, we must also follow him.
Our heroes have beheld it and our seers,
Who in the darkest hours foretold the dawn.
It flashes on the sword for freedom drawn:
It makes a rainbow of a people’s tears.
The vast, the infinite, no more appal
Him who on homely ways has seen it fall:
He trusts the far, he dowers the unknown
With all the love that Earth has made our own,
And all the beauty that his dreams recall:
For him the loneliest deeps of night it cheers;
It gathers in its fold the countless spheres,
And makes a constant homelight for them all.
 A HALT ON THE WAY

A pause, a halt upon the way!

A time for dreaming and recalling;
We bore the burden of the day,
And now the autumn night is falling.

A halt in life! a little while

In which to be but a beholder,
And think not of the coming mile
And feel not, “I am growing older.”

A stern old man with wrinkled brow,

Urging us on with beckoning finger,
Time seems no longer—rather now
A sweetheart who would make us linger.

Old times are with us,—long ago;

Upon the wall familiar shadows;
We find again the haunts we know,
The pleasant pathways through the meadows.

And as we turn and look ahead,

Seeking beyond for things departed,
And dream of pathways we must tread
In days to come through lands uncharted,

Old faiths still light us on our way,

Old love and laughter, hope and sorrow,—
As evening of the Northern day
Becomes the morning of to-morrow.
 OLD LANDMARKS

The log flames, as they leap and fall,

Cast ancient shadows on the wall;
Again I hear the south-west blow
About the house, as long ago
We heard it, when we gathered round
The hearth made homelier by the sound
That in the chimney caverns keened
And told of things the darkness screened.
Dim in their panels round the room
The old unchanging faces loom;
And soft upon the crimson robe,
The hand that rests upon a globe,
The dusky frames, the faded tints,
The flicker of the hearth-light glints.
Out in the yard familiar tones
Of voices reach me; on the stones
A waggon rumbles, and a bark
Welcomes an inmate from the dark.
It might be twenty years ago,
So much of all we used to know
Remains unchanged; and yet I feel
Some want that makes it half unreal.
For we who long ago were part
Of all we knew, the very heart
Of all we loved, let somewhere slip
The bonds of that old comradeship.
The past awakes; but while I muse
Here in the same old scenes, I lose
The paths to which we once had clues.
Along familiar ways we went
All day, at every turn intent
To mark where Time had made a theft,
Or undisturbed our treasure left.
H ld d d h
Here an old tree was down, and there
A roof had fallen, a hearth was bare,
Where once we saw amid the smoke
The glowing turf, the kindly folk.
Here one we had watched beside the plough
Stride with his horses, hobbled now;
And here there strode a full-grown man
Where once a bare-legged urchin ran.
And where was now that girl whose feet
Once made yon mountain path so sweet?
Whose shyness flushed her cheek, the while
The mischief hidden in her smile
Belied it? I behold the spot
Where once she passed but now is not,
The grey rocks, where the mountain breeze
Fluttered the skirts about her knees.
We passed beside the wheelwright’s door
Where, as it used to be, the floor
Was piled with shavings, and a haze
Of dusty motes made dim the rays
Of sunlight, and the air was sweet
With smell of new-sawn wood and peat.
We heard the smithy anvil clink,
And saw the fire grow bright and sink
In answer to the bellows’ wheeze,
While, as of old, between his knees
The smith a horse’s fetlocks drew,
And rasped the hoof and nailed the shoe.
Here, and at every place of call,
The welcome that we had from all,
The pleasant sound of names outgrown
By which in boyhood we were known,
Quick springing to their lips, a look
That backward to old meetings took
Our thoughts, a word that brought to mind
Something for ever left behind,—
All, though they blessed us, touched the springs
Of tears at the deep heart of things.
O tea s at t e deep ea t o t gs.

We saw the mountains far away,

Beyond whose blue horizons lay
The wonderlands of which we dreamed
Of old; and still their barrier seemed
To tell us of the pilgrim quest,
And things remote and unpossessed,—
Not of that world which on our hearts
Had marked its bounds and graved its charts.
They told us of that unknown shore
That none can find; but where, before,
They called us o’er the world to roam,
They now seemed sheltering walls of home.
And those old paths whose ends we sought
Were dearer for themselves than ought
Their ends foretold: no truth could harm
Their beauty or undo their charm;
No disillusions of the far
Could touch their homeliness, or mar
The love that made them what they are.

Here we were children: here in turn

Our children in the same paths learn
The secrets of the woods and flowers,
And dream the dreams that once were ours.
Their vision keen renews our own,
Their certainties our doubts atone,
And, sharing in their joys, we weave
The years we find with those we leave.
A little weary, glad of rest
Ourselves, our hearts are in their quest.
Pilgrims of life, whose steps have slowed,
We love to linger on the road,
Or reach the welcome stage, while they
Are eager for the unknown way.
Some time to come their thoughts will turn
To these wild winter nights, and yearn
For something lost and left behind
For something lost and left behind,
As now I turn.—I hear the wind
Keen in the chimney as of old,
And darkness falls on field and fold;—
I catch the clue, on scenes that were
I look not backward,—I am there!
The men are gone, the gates are barred,
We steal across the empty yard,
The cattle drowse within their stalls,
The shelter of our homestead walls
Is round us, and the ways without
Are filled with mystery and doubt.
Over the hidden forest sweeps
The wind, and all its haunted deeps
Are calling, and we do not dare
Farther beyond our walls to fare
Than o’er one field, the sheds to gain
Where, sheltered from the wind and rain,
The watchful shepherd and his dogs
Still tarry, and a fire of logs,
A lantern’s light, a friendly bark,
Make us an outpost in the dark.
I miss the way! I drop the clues!
Through mists of years again I lose
My childhood, and alone I sit
And watch the shadows leap and flit
Above the hearth. The world that lies
Beyond our homely boundaries
I know, and in the darkness dwell
No hidden foes, no wizard spell.
But still the starry deeps are crossed
By lonelier paths than those we lost;
Still the old wonder and the fear
Of what we know not, makes more dear
The ways we know; and still, no less
Than in my childhood’s days, I bless
The shelter of their homeliness.

A id th b dl d k
Amid the boundless and unknown
Each calls some guarded spot his own;
A shelter from the vast we win
In homely hearths, and make therein
The glow of light, the sound of mirth,
That bind all children of the earth
In brotherhood; and when the rain
Beats loud upon the window-pane,
And shadows of the firelight fall
Across the floor and on the wall,
And all without is wild and lone
On lands and seas and worlds unknown,—
We know that countless hearthlights burn
In darkened places, and discern,
Inwoven with the troubled plan
Of worlds and ways unknown to man,
The shelter at the heart of life,
The refuge beyond doubt and strife,
The rest for every soul outcast,
The homely hidden in the vast;
And doubt not that whatever fate
May lie beyond us, soon or late,
However far afield we roam,
The unknown way will lead us home.

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

By SIDNEY ROYSE LYSAGHT

Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
POEMS OF THE UNKNOWN WAY
 ATHENÆUM.—“The series of poems under the general heading, ‘The
Undiscovered Shore,’ contains some exquisite renderings of the moods and
impressions of one who goes down, literally as well as tropically, into the
great waters. They are full of melody, full of sadness—the harvest of an eye
quick to catch the beauty of external circumstance and of an ear open to the
calling of the highways of the seas and the highways of life.... Mr. Lysaght
puts an exceptional sense of rhythm at the service of sincere thinking and
fine feeling.”
DAILY CHRONICLE.—“Mr. Lysaght has an admirable style and an
almost Swinburnian command of metre.”
LITERARY WORLD.—“Here is stuff with the right ring; with an accent
such as this to guide him, the critic cannot fall into a mistake. We have
enjoyed our tour among Mr. Lysaght’s perplexities in no half-hearted
fashion.”
Crown 8vo. 6s.
HER MAJESTY’S REBELS
MORNING POST.—“A most remarkable book, and no one on the look-
out for the best in contemporary fiction can afford to miss it.”
WORLD.—“Rare and charming novel.... The story is intensely
interesting, and every individual is alive and appealing.”
ACADEMY.—“To find fault with Her Majesty’s Rebels is difficult, and to
praise it worthily is not easy; few Irish books of such good parts have come
into our hands since Carleton’s days.”
STANDARD.—“The story is tremendously absorbing and poignant.”
SPECTATOR.—“A very striking story.”
DAILY CHRONICLE.—“An able book, certainly one of the ablest of the
year.”
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON.

By SIDNEY ROYSE LYSAGHT

Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. each.
ONE OF THE GRENVILLES
 DAILY TELEGRAPH.—“Bound to be discussed by any one who reads it,
and whatever the verdict of the reader may be, he cannot fail to be
interested and attracted.”
GUARDIAN.—“A really good and absorbing tale.”
ACADEMY.—“There is freshness and distinction about One of the
Grenvilles.... Both for its characters and setting and for its author’s pleasant
wit, this is a novel to read.”
BOOKMAN.—“So high above the average of novels that its readers will
want to urge on the writer a more frequent exercise of his powers.”
THE MARPLOT
SPECTATOR.—“A clever, original, and vigorous work.”
WORLD.—“It is not often the path of the reviewer is brightened by so
admirable a piece of work as Mr. Lysaght’s novel, The Marplot.”
PALL MALL GAZETTE.—“A book which the reader cannot put down
without a glow of honest pleasure.... Of very high excellence.”
SATURDAY REVIEW.—“We do not often come across a better specimen
of modern fiction than The Marplot.”
DAILY TELEGRAPH.—“The whole book teems with good things.”
BOOKMAN.—“There is not a dull page in The Marplot.”
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON.
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