“Oh, please,” Zhao said. “I won’t lie to you — he’s a relative of my aunt. She came to me about this, but I put her off. But he won’t stop hounding me. I see no reason for you to say no. You could knock something like that out by skipping one round of mahjong. I got him to agree to pay you five thousand yuan.”
“I’ll use a pen name,” Zhuang said.
“No, you can’t,” Zhao replied. “It’s your name he’s paying for.”
“My name is worth five thousand yuan?”
“You’re a man of good character, and, unfortunately, these days that equals poverty. Five thousand is nothing to sneer at. You wouldn’t get much more than that by writing a whole novel.”
“I’ll think it over.”
“He’s coming to my place today, so make up your mind now. Don’t mention the money. I want him to pay up front. These people are rolling in the stuff.”
They arrived at Zhao Jingwu’s home, where a popcorn peddler had a fire going in his stove, sending smoke into the air in front of the gate. Zhao kicked the stove. “Are you trying to suffocate us? Can’t you go somewhere else?” The soot-covered peddler rolled his eyes and was about to stand up to Zhao, but after he took a couple of steps, he swallowed hard and moved his stove away.
After the smoke cleared, Zhuang took a look at the address: 37 Sifu Road. The fancy arched gateway had decorative tiles and spiny glass ridges. Stone blocks carved with scenes and figures topped the towers. A detached protective guard on the frame, peeling black paint on the doors, and six missing metal fasteners marred the gateway. A pair of unicorns in relief decorated the high bluestone gate pier. Iron rings were inlaid in the outer walls, which were fronted by long purple stones. Seeing how intently Zhuang was looking everything over, Zhao told him that the rings were for tethering horses, while the long purple stones were known as mounting stones. In earlier days, rich families rode horses down the street; bells fastened to the reins rang out, and the hoof beats pounded rhythmically. It was a more impressive sight than officials riding by in cars these days. The carving on the gate pier particularly impressed Zhuang, who said that the residents of Xijing had excavated and restored just about everything else, but no one had paid any attention to the pier gate carvings. If he went around making stone pier rubbings, he could publish a book of them. He walked in through the gate and up to a screen wall that blocked the view from outside. The relief design was one of Zheng Banqiao’s single-stalk bamboo paintings between a pair of scrolls that read
A stalk of green bamboo braves the storm
Like a brush that paints clouds in the sky
“This is the first time I’ve seen one of Zheng’s single-stalk bamboo paintings,” Zhuang said, clapping happily. “Why don’t you make a rubbing of it?”
“They’re going to demolish the house,” Zhao told him, “and take this down. If you like it so much, why don’t you preserve it?”
“The poem isn’t bad,” Zhuang replied, “but being carved into a gate screen gives it a bit of a bleak quality.”
Once inside the compound, they faced three courtyards, each of which fronted an entryway, a corridor, and a bedroom with eight patterned windows. But a motley collection of residents had carved up the yard, with a tent here, a little shack there, and buckets of filthy water and trash baskets blocking every door. With difficulty, Zhuang and Zhao negotiated their way through, encountering residents in their underwear cooking a meal or playing mahjong on rickety tables in doorways, all turning to gawk at the new arrivals. The rear courtyard was a jumble, including side rooms, their wood-framed windows propped open by bamboo poles. A curtain hung over the doorway, which lay in the shade of a Chinese toon tree.
“This is where I live,” Zhao said. It was dark inside, and it took some time before the pitted limestone-covered walls came into view. An old-fashioned mahogany table stood beneath the window, and behind it was a bed piled haphazardly with books and magazines. A thick layer of limestone covered the floor under the bed. Zhuang knew that was to protect against dampness. Zhao invited Zhuang to sit with him in two squat chairs, which Zhuang noted were exquisite. He heaved a sigh. “This is my first time inside one of these Xijing residential compounds,” he said. “People used to say how comfortable they were. Now that they’re home to so many families, I wonder what it was like to be the only residents in one.”
“We were the only residents, but poor people were allowed to move in in the fifties, and once they were here, you couldn’t get them out. The numbers mounted, all but destroying the place.”
“So this place was yours. You never told me your family was wealthy.”
“You won’t believe it, but they weren’t just wealthy. When the Eight-Power Allied Forces sacked Beijing at the end of the Qing dynasty, who do you think protected the Empress Dowager when she fled to Xijing? My grandfather. He was a famous Legalist scholar who served as the head of the Bureau of Punishments. The whole street was ours. When the allied armies attacked, he was one of the five pro-war leaders of the Qing court, a secret supporter of the Boxers. The allied armies were invincible, so the Empress Dowager fled west. The official Li Hongzhang stayed behind in Beijing to sign the Xinchou Unequal Treaty with the demonic Western powers, who demanded that the senior pro-war figures be severely punished, my grandfather included. They were to be hanged. The Empress Dowager was told to hand him over, but sixty thousand Xijing residents massed in front of the clock tower, saying that if she turned my grandfather over, she could no longer stay in Xijing. To appease the crowd, and to keep one of her ministers from falling into the hands of the Westerners, she allowed him to commit suicide. He swallowed gold, but when that didn’t do the trick, he allowed himself to be smothered to death. He was fifty. After that, women in the family began selling off property to survive, until only this compound was left. You can see for yourself, these two chairs were the only things passed down to me.”
“My!” Zhuang exclaimed. “Such a distinguished family history. Six months ago, the mayor organized a team to produce a book titled Five Thousand Years of Xijing History. I was responsible for the chapter on literature and the arts. After it was published, I read that the head of the Qing dynasty Bureau of Punishments had been a Xijing man, but I never dreamed he could be your ancestor. If the dynasty hadn’t fallen, your grandfather would have lived his life out, and I’d have had a devil of a time trying to see you.”
Zhao laughed. “And Xijing’s Four Young Knaves wouldn’t be the bastards we have now.”
Zhuang stood up. Through the bamboo door curtain he saw a woman in red sitting on the steps across the yard rocking her baby in a cradle and reading a book. “The world is changing all the time,” he said. “This is what a once-magnificent home has deteriorated into. Pretty soon even this will be gone. Tongguan is my ancestral home, and as one of the most strategic spots in the Central Plain, it has been the site of many glorious chapters in our history. But ten years ago, the county seat was moved, and the town became a wasteland. I went back not long ago and sat in one of the old buildings. I couldn’t stop sighing. When I came back, I wrote an essay about it; maybe you read it.”
“I did,” Zhao replied, “which is why I invited you here today. Maybe you can write about this sometime.”
The woman was now facing them, but did not look up. She was too caught up in her reading; only her long dark lashes and straight nose were visible. “She’s lovely,” Zhuang said.