Whispers

In the depths of night, I hear whispers as the moon sets like a golden basin.
DO WORDS SPOKEN at that hour of night seem especially intimate, even when they're not? I don't mean to pretend that any of the things I am about to say are solemn secrets. But since my editor is forcing me to finish this essay quickly, my words may not have been selected as carefully as they might. What I write here need not be thought about too intently, because these are the sorts of things that are always there, part of the backdrop of the subconscious. So pretend, if you will, that you heard these words whispered endlessly into your ear on a night when the moon slowly sets like a golden basin.
This morning, the landlord sent someone up to measure the length of the hot water pipes, in all likelihood so that he could take them apart and sell them as scrap. My aunt could not help feeling a kind of retroactive attachment and heaved a sigh for the vulgar notions people have when they think shortsightedly and merely for the moment: these are chaotic times.
People living in chaotic times get by however they can, without a real home to call their own. And yet I maintain an abiding attachment to my aunt's place. My mother and my aunt lived together for many years, and although they moved several times and my mother is no longer in Shanghai, leaving my aunt behind, her house has always presented itself to me as an exquisitely complete system, one that I must not allow to be dismantled in any way. The day before yesterday, I broke a glass tabletop that cost six hundred Yuan to replace, and I was already just about bankrupt, yet I still rushed to call the carpenter to come and fix it.
 Lately, for some unknown reason, I've been unusually prone to breaking things. (Things, that is, besides cups, plates, bowls, and soup spoons, which don't count. If my aunt happens to break a teacup, I always delightedly announce that "Now it's finally Auntie's turn to break something!") The most recent incident happened when I was in a rush to go out to the balcony to take in the wash and tried to push open the glass doors, which refused to budge. I put my knee against the door and gave it a shove, and with a sudden shattering sound, the pane fell to pieces. There was only a small cut on my knee, but the blood ran down my leg all the way to the top of my foot, and when I covered the wound in red iodine solution, it dripped down my leg along with the blood, so I ended up looking as if I had been at the receiving end of Big Knife Wang Wu's proverbial knife. When I showed my aunt, she hurriedly bent down to inspect the wound, and having assured herself that it was far from fatal, began to ask with genuine concern about the window glass, which I ended up replacing.
My home at present is basically complete to the very last detail, and yet all I do is crash back and forth across it, breaking things as I go. And since a real home should always fit, growing up along with its occupant, I'm reminded of homes I have had in the past.
My first home was in Tianjin. I was born in Shanghai, but we moved to northern China when I was two years old. We went to Beijing as well, but all I remember of that time is being carried hither and thither by a servant as I held on to the loose skin around her neck with my hand. As she grew older, the skin gradually began to sag, and it felt different each time I reached my hand under her chin. I had a terrible temper as a child, and when I got impatient I would grab her so hard that there was blood on her face. Her last name was He, and she was called He Gan, which sounds like "what to do?". I don't know which local dialect we were using, but we always ended up calling the old servants "What to do." He Can sounds a bit like one of those fashionable pen names, like He Ruo (what is it like?), He Zhi (where to go?), and He Xin (what heart?).
I have a copy of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House that my father bought around that time. He inscribed his name in English on a blank flyleaf:
Timothy C. Chang
No. 26, 32nd Street Tientsin, North China 1926
 I have always found solemnly noting one's name, address, and the date on a book quite dreary, even superfluous. But when I came across these lines, the discovery pleased me, because they exude the desultory atmosphere of a spring day, like our house in Tianjin.
There was a swing set in the courtyard. Once, one of the maids-a tall woman whom I called "Scar Girl" because she had a scar on her forehead—swung herself up to the very top and flipped over. We had chickens in the back court. On a summer afternoon, I sat on a bench in the courtyard, dressed in red pants and a short silk blouse printed with little red peaches on a white background, finishing up a bowl of pale green herbal tonic, which was slightly astringent but also a touch sweet, and reading aloud from a book of riddles: "A little dog that takes a bite with every step." The answer to the riddle was "scissors." There was also a book of collected children's songs, including a tune that extolled a life of scholarly seclusion spent somewhere between the country and the city. I only remember one line—"With peach branches and peach leaves as our consorts"-which doesn't sound very much like the sort of thing children would enjoy singing.
In the corner of the courtyard, there was a big gray stone tablet. One of the servants, who was full of ambition and knew how to read and write, always used to practice writing big characters on it by dipping a traditional writing brush in water and running the tip across the stone. He was thin and rather elegant, and he used to tell me stories from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.' I liked him. I gave him an unaccountably strange-sounding nickname: Brush Thing. Brush Thing's two younger brothers were thus Brush Two and Brush Three. Brush Thing's wife was Bride of Brush Thing, or Brush Bride for short. Brush Bride had a ruddy, oval face the shape of a goose egg, with liquid eyes, and loved the story of how "Meng Lijun masqueraded as a boy to win glory in the official examinations"' She was a lovable creature but also someone whose waters ran deep. Scar Girl later married Brush Three and was forced to endure a lot of bullying from Brush Bride. Of course, I understood very little of all this at the time. All I knew then was what a lovable and appealing family they were. They were
'A beloved Ming dynasty vernacular novel detailing the military and political history of the Three Kingdoms period by way of the dramatic exploits of heroes such as Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Zhuge Liang.
2Meng Lijun is said to have masqueraded as a boy in order to pass the civil service examinations and serve as prime minister of the Yuan dynasty. Her story has furnished the material for a number of vernacular stories and dramas.
 from Nanjing, and I have had a sense of the pleasantly bright and bountiful life of the common people of that city ever since—a feeling that doubtless has no grounding in reality. Much later, they left our family to open a grocery store, and another maid brought me and my little brother to their shop, so that we could give them some extra business. We did our best by picking out a few cheaply made hot water bottles decorated with floral motifs and drank a cup of tea in their upstairs room. That visit also left me with a feeling for the pleasant bounty of glass jars stuffed full of candy. In the end, though, their family wound up losing all the money they had invested in the shop and fell into dire economic straits. And Brush Thing's mother always blamed her two daughters-in-law for not providing the family with a male heir, an accusation Brush Bride secretly rebutted by pointing out that her mother-in-law had made the two couples sleep in the same room-even if there were curtains hung over each of the beds.
The woman who took care of my little brother was called Zhang Gan. She had bound feet, she was nimble and eager, and she always gained the upper hand no matter where she went. The woman who took care of me, He Gan, discouraged on account of having been put in charge of a girl child instead of a boy, deferred to her in all matters. I could not abide Zhang Gan's chauvinism and her contempt for girls, so I always picked fights with her, and each time she would say: "With a temper like yours, you'll end up a spinster! I hope you get married off somewhere far, far away; even your brother wouldn't want you to come home!" And she knew how to predict my future simply by looking at the way I positioned my fingers when I held my chopsticks: "You hold your chopsticks close. That means you'll be married far away." I quickly shifted my fingers farther up the chopsticks. "What about if I hold them farther away?" She said, "Of course, if you hold them like that, you'll be married even farther from home." That infuriated me even more. From very early on, Zhang Gan made me aware of the inequality between men and women, and because of that awareness, I was determined to sharpen my wits and surpass my little brother.
Not that my little brother was very formidable. He was quite sickly, and his diet was severely restricted as a result, which made him extremely greedy. If he saw someone's mouth moving, he would demand that they open up and let him see what was inside. Sick in bed, he would noisily demand to be given some pine brittle, a treat made of powdered pine nuts and flakes of rock sugar. Someone once mixed a little gold thread syrup (a bitter herbal medicine) with the rock sugar to discourage him from eating it. He burst into tears, stuck his little fist entirely into his mouth, and kept right on eating. And so they rubbed some of the bitter syrup on his fist, and
 his sobs grew even louder and more inconsolable. But he continued to suck on his fist.
The pine brittle was kept in a little decorative tin with gold-colored handles. Next to this tin was a yellowish orange ceramic container in the shape of a flat peach, which contained prickly-heat powder. The white afternoon sun used to shine across the surface of that antique dressing table, rubbed pale and smooth by the years. Once Zhang Gan bought a persimmon and put it away in the drawer because it still wasn't ripe enough to eat. A couple of days later, I opened the drawer to take a look. I began to suspect that Zhang Gan had forgotten all about the persimmon's existence, and yet I could not bring myself to ask her about it, out of a perverse kind of pride. After many more days, the persimmon had rotted into a puddle. I felt terrible pangs of regret about the whole affair, which is why I remember it to this day.
This earliest home lacked that someone known as my mother, although we hardly felt that as a loss, because she had been missing from our lives from very early on. When she was there, I remember that the servants would bring me to her bed every morning. It was a big brass bed. I would crawl across the checkerboard of her indigo cotton quilt, uncomprehendingly reciting the Tang dynasty poems she was teaching me to memorize. She was always grumpy upon awakening and would have to play with me for a long time before she could begin to perk up. I first began learning Chinese characters lying on the edge of that bed. Every afternoon, I was given two pieces of mung bean cake in reward for having learned two characters.
Later, when my father took on a concubine outside the house, he wanted to bring me along to his other place for a visit. He carried me to the back gate. I absolutely refused to go along and held on to the door as if my life depended on it, flailing wildly at him with my legs. He was so angry that he flipped me over, gave me a spanking, picked me up, and carried me out the gate. When we arrived, I complacently consumed a not inconsiderable amount of candy. His other apartment had mahogany furniture and little silver saucers with tiny feet that sat atop a mica tabletop edged with carved floral motifs. His mistress was very skilled at making small talk with me.
On the day she boarded the boat to go overseas with my aunt, my mother lay on the wicker bed sobbing. She was wearing a green blouse and a green skirt with little shiny squares that trembled along with her body. The servants came into the room several times to tell her that it was time to leave, but she seemed not to have heard them, and they dared not speak again. They pushed me toward her and told me what to say: "Auntie, it's getting late." (I was technically in my father's brother's custody, which is why I had to use "Aunt" and "Uncle" to address my own parents.) She ignored me and continued to sob. Sprawled across the bed she looked like the sea reflected on the window glass of a ship's cabin: a slender strip of green, full nonetheless of all the mighty sadness and unfathomable turbulence of the ocean.
I stood in front of the wicker bed watching, at a loss for words, for no one had told me what else I was supposed to say. Fortunately, another servant finally led me away.
After my mother left, my father's concubine moved in. The house became extremely lively, with frequent banquets during which the guests would be entertained by hired courtesans. I would hide behind the curtains and steal glances at these goings-on, gazing with particularly rapt attention at two sisters of sixteen or seventeen reclining on the sofa, their hair done up identically in bangs, sporting matching jade green Chinese-style jackets, leaning snow-pale across one another, like Siamese twins.
My father's concubine disliked my little brother and as a result went out of her way to show me her favor. Every day, she would bring me to the Catherine Ballroom to watch the dancers. I would sit in a chair at the table, confronted by the creamy white icing piled eyebrow high atop my piece of cake. And yet I would eat the whole piece of cake and then gradually doze off in the red dusky light, sleeping there until three or four in the morning, when one of the maids would carry me home on her back.
The family hired a teacher for my brother and me on the traditional model of home schooling in the Chinese classics. We read and recited texts all day long, rocking our bodies back and forth as we chanted by a window until dusk. When we read the line "The Great King serves Xunyu," I changed it to "The Great King craves smoked fish [xunyu]" in my head so that I could memorize it. At that time, I suffered quite often for my failures to learn my lessons by heart. Perhaps it was because I had cried early in the morning on the first day of the New Year and was thus condemned to cry all year long. On New Year's Eve, I had instructed the maid to wake me bright and early the next morning so that I could watch the festivities. Who would have guessed that, fearing I would be overtired from staying up the night before, they would let me sleep a few extra hours? By the time I awoke, all the firecrackers were already spent. I felt as if all things wonderful and boisterous were gone forever, had bypassed me entirely. I lay down on the bed and cried, and then I cried some more, refusing to sit up until they pulled me onto a wicker chair. Someone slipped a pair of ceremonial "New Year's shoes" on my feet, and still I cried—because even a new pair of shoes could not help me catch up with the new year.
 My father's concubine lived downstairs in a dimly lit, cluttered, and cavernous room that I was only rarely allowed to enter. I would stand by my father's opium couch reciting my lessons. My father's concubine knew how to read and would lash out impulsively at her nephew as he was taught to recite lines like "The fish in the pool swim to and fro." These blows were so fierce that her nephew's eyes were often swollen shut. Nor was my father exempt from these beatings. She once cracked his head open with a spittoon. That was the incident that ultimately drove someone in the clan to speak up and send her packing. I sat on the ledge of the second-story window and watched as two carriages slowly moved away from the front gate, laden with silver and household goods. The servants said among themselves, "So much the better that she's gone."
The year I turned eight I came to Shanghai by boat, crossing "darkling waves and green swells" that really were as black as lacquer and as green as jade, and though I had yet to read any literary odes to the sea, I was thrilled by the sensation it gave me. I would fall asleep in the cabin reading for the umpteenth time my copy of The Journey to the West, in which one finds only high peaks and the hot red sand of the desert.3
When we arrived in Shanghai and rode into town in a buggy, I felt delightfully opulent in my vest-coat of foreign cloth across whose pink background fluttered a host of embroidered blue butterflies. We stayed in a very small shikumen house with red-stained walls.4 For me, even the walls were an enveloping crimson pleasure.
But it was then that my father injected himself with an overdose of morphine and very nearly died. He sat on the balcony, a wet towel over his head, gazing fixedly forward as thick white ropes of rain fell from the eaves in front of him. I could not tell what he was muttering to himself over the roar of the rain, and I was very frightened.
The maid told me that I ought to be very happy because my mother was coming home. The day she was due to return, I noisily demanded that they let me wear what I thought of as my most impishly stylish red jacket. But the first words to emerge from her mouth when she saw me were, "How could you let her wear such a tiny little jacket?" And very soon after, an
3Journey to the West, best known in Arthur Waley's abridged English translation, Monkey, is a Ming dynasty vernacular novel attributed to Wu Cheng'en and detailing the adventures of an intrepid monk and his companions (including the Sun Wukong, the magical monkey) during their quest to find and transport the sacred Tripitaka Buddhist scriptures from India to China. 4A distinctively Shanghainese form of densely packed modern row housing, located off the main avenues along gated lanes.
 entirely new wardrobe was made for me, and everything else was different as well. My father bitterly repented of his past mistakes and was sent to the hospital. We moved into a western-style garden villa, with a dog, flower beds, children's books full of fairy tales, and an abrupt infusion into our home of lovely and elegant relatives and friends. My mother sat with a plump auntie on the piano bench, imitating the love scene in a movie. Sitting on the floor watching, I burst into peals of laughter and rolled back and forth across a wolfskin blanket.
I wrote a letter to an old classmate in Tianjin describing our new house, filling three whole pages with illustrative diagrams and sketches. There was no reply: who wouldn't be annoyed by such raw and uncultivated braggadocio? I was of the firm opinion that everything about our house stood at the very summit of beauty. In retrospect, a blue sofa set matched with an old rose red carpet can hardly be said to be the most harmonious combination, but I liked it then, and I also liked Great Britain, because the characters for "England" made me think of little red houses underneath a blue sky, while "France" was a blue-green shade of drizzle, like the porcelain tiles in the bathroom, redolent of the aroma of shampoo. My mother told me later that England was dreary and rainy and that France was sunny and bright, but I have always been completely unable to revise these first impressions.
My mother also told me that in drawing pictures one should always avoid using red in the background, because the background must be kept at a distance from the rest of the image, and red seems to leap right out of the picture and into your eyes. The walls of the bedroom I shared with my little brother, though, were painted just the sort of orangey red that refuses to keep its distance. I had chosen the color, and when I drew pictures, I still liked to color the walls behind all the little people red, because things looked warmer and cozier and more intimate that way.
Besides drawing, I played piano and learned English. That was probably the only time in my life when I luxuriated in the stylish ways of a pampered foreign girl. Not only that: in those days I was flush with a superabundance of sentiment. Coming across a dried flower pressed between the leaves of a book, I listened to my mother tell a story about how it came to be preserved there, and tears ran down my face. When my mother saw that I was crying, she said to my little brother, "Look at your sister! She knows that there are better things to cry about than candy." I was so pleased by these words of praise that my tears immediately ran dry-which posed quite an embarrassing dilemma.
At that time, Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short story monthly) was serializing Lao
 She's novel of Chinese emigrés in London, Erma (The two Mas). We received the latest issue every month by post. My mother would sit on the western-style toilet seat laughing and reading aloud, while I leaned against the door frame laughing along with her. To this day, I still like Erma, even though Lao She's later novels Lihun (Divorce) and Huoche (Train) are much better.
After my father recovered from his illness, he underwent yet another change of heart and began to withhold living expenses from my mother, forcing her to supplement her fixed allowance with her own funds until she had spent every last penny. After a while, she would be too broke to leave him, if she had desired to do so. They would fight with such fierce intensity that the servants were frightened into removing the children from the scene of battle and instructing us to behave and not pay any mind to things that didn't concern us. At such times, my little brother and I would sit quietly on the terrace on our little tricycles, without making a sound. It was late spring, and the terrace was shaded by a green bamboo trellis, striping the ground with sunlight.
My parents eventually agreed to a divorce. My auntie, who was in fact father's younger sister, had never been able to get along with her brother, so she moved out with my mother. My father moved to a house in a narrow Shanghai-style alley. (My father never cared much for the arts of attire, eating, or residing. He cared only for driving, and his car was the only thing on which he could bear spending any money.) Although my opinion was never solicited as to the merits of the divorce, I was entirely in favor of it, despite the melancholy knowledge that I would be unable to continue living in my blue-and-red home. Fortunately, the agreement stipulated that I could still see my mother on a regular basis. It was in her new apartment that I saw a built-in porcelain bathtub and gas stove for the first time, which made me very happy and came as something of a consolation.
Not long after, my mother decided to move to France. I was then at a boarding school. When she came to say good-bye, I expressed no regret at her departure, and she seemed quite cheerful as well. That last good-bye was so smooth, so unruffled, so free of any entangling incident that I knew she was thinking to herself "how cold and unfeeling the younger generation has become." I stood in the distance, watching until she had made her exit through the school gates, gazing past a giant cedar tree in the middle ground, and even after the painted red iron gate shut behind her, I remained unmoved. But I gradually came to the realization that scenes such as these called for tears, and so the tears came. I began to sob loudly in the cold wind just so that I could see myself cry.
 My mother was gone, but something of her atmosphere lingered in my aunt's house: an exquisitely carved table with an interlocking "puzzle-piece" mosaic on top, gentle pastel colors, wonderful people whose lives were beyond my ken constantly bustling in and out the front door. All the best things I knew, be they spiritual or material, were contained in those rooms. And that is why spiritual and material virtues have always seemed intermeshed for me, unlike the average young person, who sees them as diametrically opposed and is thus prone to moments of pained conflict that culminate in one inevitably being sacrificed at the expense of another.
On the other side was my father's house. I looked down on everything there: opium, the old tutor who taught my little brother to write his "Discourse on the First Emperor of the Han Dynasty," old-style linked-chapter fiction, languorous, ashen, dust-laden living. Like a Persian worshiping at the altar of fire, I forcibly divided the world into two halves: bright and dark, good and evil, god and the devil. Whatever belonged to my father's side was bad, even if I sometimes liked it. I liked the sunlight filtering through clouds of opium smoke, hovering like a fog over an untidy room strewn with stacks of tabloids. (Even now, great big stacks of tabloids give me the sensation of having come home.) I liked reading the paper and joking with my father about family affairs. I knew he was lonely. When he was lonely, he liked me. My father's room was a perpetual afternoon, and when I sat there for a long time, I would always feel that I was sinking deeper and deeper into its meshes.
On the positive side, I was full of vast ambitions and expansive plans. After high school, I would go to England to study. There was one period during which I determined that I was going to learn how to make animated movies as a means of introducing Chinese painting to the United States. I wanted to make an even bigger splash than Lin Yutang.5 I wanted to wear only the most exquisite and elegant clothing, to roam the world, to have my own house in Shanghai, to live a crisp and unfettered existence.
But something all too solid and all too real came along instead. My father decided to remarry. My aunt first told me the news as we sat one summer night on the balcony. I cried, because I had read so many novels about stepmothers and had never thought that it would happen to me. I had only one desperate thought: I must not, at any cost, let this come to pass. If that woman had been leaning against the iron railing of the balcony,

5 Chinese intellectual and essayist whose series of best-selling English-language books on China and Chinese culture garnered him great reknown in the 1930s and 1940s as a cultural emissary to the West.
 I would certainly have pitched her over the side and put an end to the matter once and for all.
My new stepmother was also an opium smoker. After the marriage, we moved to a western-style house in the style of the early Republic, which had originally been our own family property. In fact, I had been born in that house. The rooms had too many family memories, like stacks of indistinct photographic reprints blurring the very air around us. The sunny corners of the house set one dozing, and the shady spots had the desolate chill of an ancient tomb. The dark, green-tinted heart of the house was wakeful, a strange world unto itself. And at the border where light and shade met, you could see the sun outside, hear the tinkle of the streetcar bells, and even listen to the sound of musicians inside a discount fabric shop playing "Oh, Susanna" over and over again. Even in the sunlight, one could only doze.
Living at school, I was allowed to come home only infrequently. Although I saw the tortures my little brother and He Gan were undergoing and felt their injustice, I politely made the best of things since it was so rare that I could come home at all. My father was thrilled by my compositions and even encouraged me to study poetry. All told, I wrote three seven-character quatrains in the classical style, the second of which was an ode to summer rain. I thought it was a good poem because it had been covered with approving circles and underlinings by the brush of my tutor:
A booming like the ancient drums of Jie bids the flowers to open
Cupping the rain, a lotus leaf
puts forth its first bloom
The third poem sang the praises of the woman warrior Hua Mulan, but it was so bad that I lost interest in continuing my study of poetry.
The year I graduated from middle school, my mother came back. Although I myself was unaware of any changes, my father did not fail to note that my attitude toward him had indeed changed. And for him this was an unbearable slight: I had lived with him for so many years, he was the one who had supported me, he had provided me with an education, and yet my heart remained tied to the other side. I made matters all the worse by delivering a speech proclaiming my determination to study abroad-a halting, altogether inept speech. His temper flared. He announced that I had been manipulated by interested parties. My stepmother launched into a tirade directed at my mother: "She's got her divorce, yet she still wants to meddle in our family affairs. If she can't let well enough alone, why doesn't she just
 come back to live with us again? Too bad she's a little too late! She'll have to be content as a concubine this time."
My problems had to be set aside for the moment when the Japanese attacked Shanghai in 1937. Our house was near the Soochow Creek, and I could not sleep at night because of the noise of artillery fire, so I went to stay at my mother's house for a couple of weeks. The day I got back, my stepmother asked me, "How could you have left without even letting me know?" I said that I had told my father. She said, "Oh? You told your father! But you didn't pay the least attention to me!" And she slapped me across the face. I instinctively raised my hand to strike back but was dragged away by two of the servant women. My stepmother ran screaming shrilly up the stairs, "She hit me! She hit me!" At that moment, everything around me suddenly took on an exceptional clarity: the dimly lit dining room with its shuttered windows, the dishes that had just been laid on the table, the goldfish bowl without any goldfish, slender trails of orange algae sticking out from inside the porcelain. My father's slippered feet came slapping down the stairs, he grabbed hold of me, and, in a hail of feet and fists, shouted: "So you hit people now? If you can hit her, I can hit you! Today's the day I'm going to beat you to death if it's the last thing I do!" I felt my head flattened to one side and then to the other, more times than I could count, and my ears went deaf from the blows. I slumped to the ground and lay flat on the floor, yet he still held me fast by the hair and let fly with a series of kicks. Someone finally dragged me away. I remembered very clearly something my mother had once said—"If ever by any chance he hits you, whatever you do, don't hit back. Because if you do, you'll always be made to be in the wrong"-so I had no thought of resistance. He went back upstairs. I stood up, went to the bathroom, and looked at the cuts and livid finger-shaped welts on my face. I decided to report what had happened to the police, but when I reached the front gate, the guard grabbed hold of me with these words, "The gate is locked. The key's with the master." I tried my best to make a scene, screaming and slamming at the iron gate with my feet in hopes that I could catch the attention of the local beat cops outside, but to no avail. It is actually quite difficult to make a scene. I went back inside, and my father boiled over again, launching a flower vase at my head that flew slightly wide of the mark and showered the room with ceramic shards. After he had left, He Gan sobbed, "How could you have let things come to such a pass?" It was only then that I felt the resentment and injustice of it all bubble up inside me, and I burst into a wail. I sobbed in He Gan's arms for a long time. She blamed me entirely for what had happened, for the simple reason that she cared for me and was frightened that the consequences of having offended
 my father would spell a very miserable fate indeed. Her terror made her cold and hard-hearted. I cried all alone for a whole day in one of the empty rooms downstairs and fell asleep on an old-fashioned red lacquer wood bed.
The next day, my aunt came to play the peacemaker. As soon as my stepmother saw that she had arrived, she sneered, "So, you've come to arrest the opium addicts?" Before my aunt had even said a word in reply, my father leapt up from his opium couch and struck her right across the face with a blow that sent her to the hospital, although she never reported it to the police, if only for the sake of the family name.
My father proclaimed that he would kill me with one shot from his pistol. I was locked for the time being inside the empty room downstairs, and my existence in the house where I was born suddenly became strange and unfamiliar, like a wall in the moonlight whose whiteness only stands out against the blackest of shadows, its contours flattened and demented.
Beverly Nichols has some lines in a poem that speaks to the somber half-light of dementia: "in your heart / the moonlight sleeps." When I read those lines, I am reminded of the blue moonlight shining on the floor of our house, of the hushed threat of a murder about to take place.
Even if I knew somehow that my father would never really kill me, I also realized that were I to remain imprisoned for a few years, the person who would eventually emerge would no longer be me. I aged several years in the course of a few weeks. I clasped my hands so tightly around the railings of the balcony that I might have squeezed water from wood. Above my head, the blue sky was brilliant. The sky at that time was suffused with sound, because the air was full of airplanes. I hoped that they would drop a bomb directly on our house, for I would have been willing to die along with all the rest of them.
He Gan was afraid I would try to run away. She ordered me again and again not to "go through that door, because once you leave, you'll never be able to come back again." Even so, I pondered my plans for escape long and hard. Adventures like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo seemed the likeliest sources for escape plans, but what I remembered best was how in the novel Jiuwei gui (The nine tails of the turtle), Zhang Qiugu's friend's lover uses a sheet to make a rope and then climbs out a window to freedom. 6 But my window did not open onto the street. The only way out would be to climb over the wall that enclosed the garden. There was a goose coop next to the wall that would aid me in my ascent, but in the quiet of night, it would hardly do to set a few geese squawking in alarm.
6A Republican-era crime novel written by Zhang Chunfan.
 The courtyard was also full of large, quacking white geese who liked nothing so much as chasing and pecking at all comers. There was only one tree, a magnificent white magnolia with huge flowers that looked like oversized dirty handkerchiefs or great clumps of wastepaper, forgotten and neglected, littering the ground the better part of the year. There have never been such slovenly and forlorn flowers.
Just as I was planning my exit route, I came down with a case of gastroenteritis that very nearly killed me. My father did not call a doctor, and there was no medicine for me, either. For half a year, I lay sick in bed, staring at the light blue autumn skies and the stony gray deer antlers protruding from the gatehouse across the courtyard, with its rows of little bodhisattva statues arrayed across the ground, and I could not tell in which age or whose dynasty I was living. I was born in this house in a hazy dream state. Would I just as hazily die there as well, only to be buried in the courtyard outside?
But as I lay thinking these thoughts, I listened with all my might to each and every opening or closing of the front gate, to the two metallic squeaks that rang out each time the guard pulled the rusty iron bolt that fastened the door open and shut, and to the booming sound of the iron gate shuddering on its hinges. I heard the sound in my sleep, even in my dreams, along with the crunch of footsteps walking down the black gravel path that led through the garden and to the gate. Was it possible that because of my illness they would let down their guard? Could I slip down the path and out the gate unheard?
As soon as my legs were strong enough to support me, if only by leaning against a wall, I began to plot my escape. First, I coaxed He Gan into telling me what time the two guards exchanged shifts. On that wintry night, I crouched against the window holding a telescope, watching to see if the black gravel path was clear. I edged along the wall, step by step, until I reached the front gate, pulled out the bolt, opened the door, deposited my telescope in the milk delivery box, and slipped out-it was really and truly the sidewalk that I had reached! There was no wind, just the bitter cold of the wrong side of the lunar calendar. There was nothing under the street lamps save chill gray pavement, but how adorable the world outside appeared to me at that moment! I walked with hasty steps along the side of the road, and each smack of my feet on the ground was a kiss. Not far from my house, I began to bargain with a rickshaw puller about the price of a ride-how happy I was that I had not lost my knack for haggling! I must have been temporarily insane, for I could well have been caught and brought back inside at any moment. It was only later that I came to appreciate the absurdity of this adventure of mine.
I heard later that He Gan suffered a good deal on account of her suspected complicity in my escape. My stepmother gave all my things away and
 acted thenceforth as if I were dead. That was how the home I had once lived in came to an end.
I fled to my mother's house, and that very summer, my little brother followed in my footsteps, carrying a pair of basketball shoes wrapped in newspaper, and proclaiming that he would never go back. My mother explained to him that her economic might was insufficient to the task, that she could only take on the expenses of one child at a time, which was why he could not stay with her. He cried, and I sat to one side and cried, too. Later, he did in fact go back, taking his basketball shoes with him.
He Gan secretly spirited some of my childhood toys to me as souvenirs. Among them was a carved ivory fan with pale green ostrich plumes, which, because it was so old, would shed its feathers whenever I waved it back and forth, choking the air with dust and bringing tears to my eyes. To this day, I get that same feeling when I think of the day my little brother came to visit.
I immersed myself in books in preparation for the entrance exam to the University of London. I had grown used to being alone at my father's house, which produced in me an abrupt desire to grow up and be responsible for myself. To play the sheltered daughter in straitened circumstances seemed a terrible burden. At the same time, I could see that my mother had sacrificed quite a lot for me and that she doubted whether I was worth the sacrifice. I shared her doubts. I often went all alone to the top of the apartment building to take a solitary walk around the roof. The white stucco Spanish walls cut sharp lines across the blue of the sky, shearing the world in two. I would lift my face to the fierce sun above, standing exposed before the sky and its judgment and, like every confused adolescent, hang suspended between overweening pride and intense self-loathing.
It was from that time onward that my mother's house was no longer full of tenderness.
I passed my entrance examination, but because of the war I was unable to go to England and ended up being diverted to Hong Kong instead. Three years later, once more on account of the war, I returned to Shanghai without having finished my degree. My apartment was still there, just as I had left it, and even though I no longer believed in it as absolutely as I once had, it is precious to me still. I live now among old dreams, even as I dream new ones.
Having arrived at this point in the essay, the breeze at my back blows a bit more chill, so I stand by the glass doors and gaze out from the balcony at a drizzle of yellow moonlight. Night in ancient times was punctuated by the beating of drums. Now, we have the wooden clappers of wonton vendors. For a thousand years, the dreams of countless multitudes measured out by the same beat-tock, tock, tock, tock: what lovable yet miserable times!