A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
realized that it had all been a dream. All the years of his extravagant life – all the feelings, desires, and joys – everything had taken place during the time it took a pot of rice to cook.
Years later, after the Communists took control of China, my father worried about the uncertain future. He sadly warned the Herb Doctor that he was not sure he would be able to support him much longer. The old doctor was not the least disturbed. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Soon I shall have the means to support myself.” And it happened just that way. He was called by the Communists to become a professor of herbal medicine at the university.
I recall how my father once laughingly mentioned something the Herb Doctor had told him.
“Do you know what he said?” my father chuckled, “He told me that when he dies he will have a fine coffin and eight thousand people will attend his funeral!” He laughed again. “Actually, I think I will have to buy his coffin for him when the time comes!”
But things turned out precisely as the Herb Doctor predicted. He knew in advance the day of his death, just as very developed Buddhists are said to. And when that day came, he bathed and prepared himself and died quietly. And because he had become a very well known and highly respected university professor, eight thousand mourners attended his funeral.
And further, when this strange, kindly, self-effacing old man who had done so much good for me and for others was cremated, he had a final surprise for us. In his ashes were found sarira, the hard stone-like objects left behind when the bodies of great saints are burned.
CHAPTER TWO
THE WORLD OF DUST
My aunt, the oldest of three sisters, was an elegant and lively woman in her youth, but she had a heart of acid. She possessed the three desirable graces of a marriageable daughter of the Manchus: She was adept at serving opium, she had tiny bound feet, and her silk embroidery was both intricately detailed and beautiful.
Her body was adorned with jasmine-scented garments of the finest silk, and the correctness of her coiffure was always set off with a single fresh blossom from the garden. It is remarkable what a paradox she was – so enticing and fragrant on the outside, so completely icy, calculating and selfish inside.
Guests saw only her delicate smile and immaculate behavior, but the house servants, who in those days were actually slaves, saw the real woman – the tyrant who flew into a rage if something was accidentally dropped or spilled; who, if any aspect of a maid’s behavior did not please, would in private lift soft, manicured fingers to withdraw a needle-sharp hairpin, and then jab it into an unfortunate servant’s cheek or hand.
One of her favorite punishments for those who displeased her was to take the red-hot implement for serving opium, and with it sear a small spot on the skin of the offender – always behind the ear or on the neck, where the evidence would be hidden by hair.
Men were irresistibly drawn to her. She was unendingly flirtatious, and easily won the love and desire of a handsome young man who was my grandfather’s bodyguard. And just as easily she broke his heart by complying with my grandmother’s wishes and marrying the man to whom she had been engaged as a child, for this was still the era of arranged marriages. And why should she be interested in a poor servant for anything but flirtatious pleasure? Her groom-to-be was the son of a wealthy antique dealer, and could keep her in the manner her family background warranted.
Actually my grandmother, a truly tough old bird, did not look past the obvious wealth of the groom-to-be’s family. Had she looked a little closer she would have found that his wealthy connoisseur father had started out as a street peddler with two baskets of old junk hanging on a stick across his shoulders. He had walked the roads crying his trade as a buyer of antiques (which was something of an exaggeration) and of old metal (which was true). And it was this low-class occupation that made his fortune.
One day that he purchased nine unusually heavy, blackened old figures of water buffalo. When he got them home he tested one to see of what metal it was made – perhaps brass or pewter? Scratching through the dark coating, he nearly fell over when he saw the glint of pure gold! And that is how a junk dealer from the streets became wealthy enough to marry his son to an aristocratic beauty of Manchu lineage.
My aunt’s extravagant wedding was an explosion of opulence, a public show of wealth that lasted three days and nights. The banquet tables were covered with expensive gourmet delicacies – among them fish lips, bear’s paws, and camel’s hump. It took fifty people to carry the bride’s dowry of household objects, and my grandfather presented her with five male and twelve female servants.
Eight years later my aunt was back living in my grandfather’s house. The rich husband my grandmother had so cunningly chosen for her proved to be an alcoholic and an opium addict who wasted the days and nights lounging with prostitutes or gambling his fortune away at the cricket fights. Betting on cricket fights may sound like a child’s game, but in only one wager my aunt’s weak-willed husband lost a house. While the money flowed away, my aunt looked about in dismay as her hopes for a high life were drowned in streams of liquor and clouds of opium smoke through which she could almost hear the high, shrill giggling of expensive prostitutes.
She managed to pull together what little was left, and with her children, now numbering three small boys and two daughters, she walked out on the son of the lucky junk seller and never went back.
Within two years her husband was destitute and dying of starvation. When at last word of his death came to my grandfather’s house in Canton, my aunt prepared the children to attend his funeral, which was far out in the countryside. The children were in a great hurry to get there, not because of any respect or love for their father, but because a new movie was opening that day in Canton, and they wanted to return in time to catch the beginning.
That my mother ever met my father is in itself surprising. She was the third of the three sisters. My aunt, of course, had already been married off. I tend to speak of “my aunt” as though there was only one. That is because the second sister was a weak and colorless individual who failed to make a strong impression on me. She was pliant and always willing to please, seemingly with no mind of her own. Some might have seen that as an advantage, had her physical appearance not betrayed even those dubious virtues. She was uncompromisingly plain, an insignificant shadow in the bright light of my older aunt’s strong personality.
No marriage was arranged for this second sister for the blunt reason that no one found her at all interesting, neither mothers nor sons. It appeared that she would quietly wend her obedient and obscure way into spinsterhood, and indeed I am sure that would have happened had my mother not inherited some of my grandfather’s liberal notions.
Mother had a marriage already arranged for her in childhood. It was my grandmother again who had chosen a suitable young man of status and money. But Granny did not reckon with her third daughter’s sense of independence.
When the time for her marriage drew near, the girl made it abundantly clear that she had no desire to marry a man she had not chosen herself and for whom she felt nothing at all. When that declaration had no effect on my grandmother’s wedding preparations, Mother chose a direct solution – she ran away from home.
Grandmother, faced with terrible social embarrassment and loss of face as a consequence of her daughter’s throwing over the groom, took the only available course: She substituted the homely second daughter, and threw in a sizable quantity of money and goods to lend some beauty to those all-too-wholesome cheeks.
Meanwhile, my mother hid out in a school for teachers a good distance to the north of Canton. Her feet were not bound, nor her mind. Like my grandfather, she believed in the equality of women and wanted to make her own destiny. Through studying teaching she hoped to earn her own living. She persisted in that course and eventually obtained a job in a small school in the countryside.
Those