Spider Eaters: A Memoir Read online

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  Old Monkey Monster

  Speaking of dreams, I recall a famous Chinese dream in which Chuang Tzu, an ancient philosopher, became a butterfly. In the spring wind he fluttered his wings; he danced among flowers. He drank dew and rested under a green leaf. His heart was ever so happy and serene. When he woke up, he was Chuang Tzu again. Wearing a scholar's hat and a long robe, he sat in his study meditating on the nature of all beings including himself. "Am I really Chuang Chou who dreamed that I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who is dreaming that I am Chuang Chou?""

  When I look back on what I have been, sometimes I, too, am perplexed. The pictures that remain vivid in my memory don't seem to fit together.

  -In the fifties there was a black-eyed and black-haired Chinese girl on Lake Geneva. A precious pearl on the palms of her parents, followed everywhere by her devoted Chinese nanny. Pink satin dress. White leather shoes. Colorful hairpins. She was proud. She was nice to people. Tourists were charmed by her. They asked to take her picture.

  -In 1966 there was a Red Guard who jumped on a train and traveled over a thousand miles to Guangzhou to spread the fire of the Cultural Revolution. She criticized First Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang to his face for his tolerance of capitalism and saw drops of sweat as large as soybeans roll down his face. An order issued by her and her comrades shook the city like a hurricane. In its wake, thousands of privately owned shops were devastated.

  -In the early seventies there was a peasant on a pig farm. Her face was dark brown and weather-beaten. Her hair was as dry and brittle as straw in late fall. She had strong muscles and a loud voice. She loved to eat dog meat with raw garlic. Her face did not change color after she gulped down several cups of Chinese liquor, which was more than 6o percent alcohol. Although her clothes and boots carried a lot of stinking mud, the work she did was neat and she took great pride in it.

  -In the nineties there is a Chinese professor in an American college. She has a Ph.D in comparative literature. She teaches Chinese language and a variety of courses on Chinese culture and literature. To her American colleagues and students, she is very Chinese. Yet her Chinese friends say that she is westernized. Some suspect that she is a feminist, because she is too independent. She has a son, whom she chose to raise by herself after a divorce. It seems unthinkable that she is doing quite all right without a husband.

  Can these be the same person? Can this person be me? Among these, which is the real me and which are the roles I have played? Once in a while I even doubt my memory. But I am sure of one thing: since I was a child, I had a feeling that the materials of which I was made were ill at ease with one another.

  My parents brought me into this world on December i, 195o. My father, people said, was an old revolutionary. He Joined the Chinese Communist Party in the early 194os. My mother, who graduated from Yanjing University (now called Beijing University) the year before I was born, was a new enthusiast for the Maoist revolution. She, like many of her peers, believed that only the Chinese Communist Party could save China. It would provide secure jobs for intellectuals and liberate workers and peasants from slavery. It would root out corruption that had plagued all the previous governments and revive China's economy that had collapsed in the 1940s.

  One thing the adults liked to tell my generation when we were young was that we were the most fortunate, because we were born in new China and grew up under the red flag. In my case only part of this was true. I was born in new China. But when I was one year old, my parents took me to Switzerland. There I grew up under a red flag, not one with five golden stars symbolizing the Communist Party and four hundred million Chinese, but one with a large white cross on it. That must have messed things up for me from very early on.

  In Switzerland we lived in Bern and Geneva, in quiet and comfortable surroundings. At that time there were four of us in our family: Father, Mother, Aunty, and I. From Monday to Saturday, I hardly saw my parents. They were both busy working at the Chinese consulate. In the morning they always left in a great hurry; in the evening unfinished work, meetings, or banquets kept them away. By the time they got home, I was already fast asleep. On Sunday, Mother usually slept until noon and Father until two o'clock in the afternoon. So in those years Aunty was about the only one who was always there for me.

  Aunty, I later found out, was no relative of ours. She was my nanny. My paternal grandmother, whom I called Nainai, hired her in Beijing shortly before I was born. Five days after Mother gave birth to me, that is, as soon as we left the hospital, Aunty took over the work from Mother. Henceforth day and night, it was she who fed me, washed me, and rocked me in her arms. I fell asleep to her soft wordless songs. It was her smile and her voice that I remembered when I was a baby. My own mother, on the other hand, left me when I was barely one month old. She flew to Switzerland to resume her work. As for my father, I did not meet him until I was one year old. At that time he came back to report on work. While he was in Beijing, he celebrated my birthday with me. Afterwards he took Aunty and me to Switzerland.

  On arrival at our new home, Father said: "Now in China it is a new society. Everybody is equal. There are no more masters and servants. People are of one big family. So let Rae, our little girl, call her Aunty instead of nanny from the start."

  Thus I learned to call her Aunty. For me, the word Aunty was dearer than Mother and Father put together, and over the years I became more important to Aunty than her own daughter, whom she had tried hard to forget. I do not know when my parents found out how I felt or how they took it when they found it out. Were they sad or glad of the fact that because of their dedication to the revolutionary work, they let a nanny steal the heart of their only daughter whom they insisted they loved very much?

  When I say this, I do not mean that I did not love my parents. Of course I did. Yet that love was different. It was rational, unlike the mysterious tie that bound Aunty and me together, body and soul. By this, I mean if a misfortune was about to befall Aunty a thousand miles away, I would feel it in my blood. I would have bad dreams at night. Such premonitions were hard to explain; yet they turned out to be right when I had them in 11978. In contrast, when my mother died suddenly in 1976, I did not feel anything. I learned the bad news the next day from Father's telegram.

  In the late r95os, when I came back to attend elementary school in Beijing, I discovered that my attachment to Aunty was not unique. Many of my classmates, who were children of high-ranking cadres, were just like me. They loved their nannies, aunties, or grandmothers more than their own parents. Sometimes the parents became so jealous that they told the nannies to go home. Others let the nannies stay for the children's sake. Of these parents, many were richly rewarded a few years later. That is, when the Cultural Revolution broke out and the parents got into trouble, the nannies took the children into their own homes and brought them up as if they were their own.

  Aunty's love for me made her blind to my shortcomings. To her I was the best child in the whole world. My younger brothers were extraordinary kids too. But I was undoubtedly the smartest and prettiest. She was proud of me at all times.

  According to her, I could remember things that occurred very early in my life. Such memories were of isolated scenes. The sight, the sound, the smell, and the touch stayed with me. Some of them were quite vivid in my mind. But the context was lost. She and my parents often had to supply the where and when.

  In Cold Spring village, the scene that came most often to my mind was of our second-floor apartment in Bern. In the morning bright sunshine poured through the large windows and glass doors. I opened my eyes in the warmth. I saw Aunty's face break into a gentle smile; tiny wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes. I knew soon she'd go to the nearby bakery to buy my favorite pastry. "Little mice bread" was the nickname Aunty and I gave it.

  The short while she was away was the most exciting time of my day. I tried to hide myself in the closets, on the balcony, or behind a piece of furniture, knowing Aunty would soon be back and would s
eek me out. The rest of the day I did not have many games to play. I had a room filled with toys: dolls, stuffed animals, music boxes, little houses, kitchen and tea sets, a train that ran around the room ... but the problem was: I had no one to play with me.

  For five years I was the only child. Although we had neighbors, my parents never tried to socialize with them. Was it because of rules that forbade them to make friends among the local people? Or was it the neighbors who were afraid of being tainted by us, knowing that we were from red China? Whatever the reason, I hardly had a friend in my childhood. So in those years the seed of loneliness dropped into my heart. Later, when it grew into a monstrous tree, I tried very hard to cut it down but I failed. Now I am an adult, I realize loneliness is my fate and I might as well enjoy it: I can sit in the shade of this gigantic tree, far away from the comings -cr i goings of the world. Breathing a deep sigh of sadness and relief, I forget the intricate network of relationships in China and elsewhere.

  Despite the loneliness, my childhood was not unhappy. Father, Mother, and Aunty all loved me. I loved them too, Aunty especially. By then, Aunty was in her early fifties. Her long hair was still mostly black, but silver threads were beginning to show around her temples. Each morning she would spend some time combing and oiling her hair. The hair oil sent out a mild sweetness to my nose. Afterwards she'd coil her hair up and pin it into a bun, which looked so elegant behind her head. This, Aunty told me, was the traditional hairstyle for a married woman in China. She had been dressing her hair like this for more than thirty years.

  Aside from her hair, her clothes were also traditional. In my memory Aunty was always wearing a slender cotton dress called qipao, which was either silver gray or indigo blue. It fitted her perfectly because she made it herself. European fashion did not affect her. In Switzerland, the only Western garment she had was a fur coat, and even that was a gift from my parents.

  Like most women who grew up in old China, Aunty had never been to school. When she came into our family, she did not know how to write her own name. Her mind, however, was a treasure box, filled with stories. Some she learned from Peking operas to which she loved to "listen" (as people in old Beijing put it, rather than see). Others were folktales told to her by her own grandmother. It was from these stories that I came to know China, my native country, which was thousands of miles away: the peasants, the water buffalo, the rice fields, the forbidden city in Beijing, the emperor and his concubines, scholars and the imperial examinations, ancestors who protected their descendants and depended on them for food and money in the nether world, and the various animal spirits that obtained Tao and magic power through meditation.

  The old monkey monster in my favorite story was such an animal spirit. To this day I remember vividly how Aunty told it to me.

  "Once upon a time there was an old monkey monster who lived in the deep mountains. One day he saw a little girl in the village who was very pretty. He started a whirlwind that darkened the sky and put dust into everybody's eyes. In the wind, the old monkey monster grabbed the girl. Carrying her under his arm, he flew over many mountains and took her to his home, which was a dark, smelly cave.

  "He asked the little girl to be his wife; but she said no. The old mon key monster was very angry. But he did not eat the girl. He shut her up in the cave.

  "One morning when the old monkey monster went out to gather wild fruit, the girl's mother arrived. She had followed the whirlwind all the way to the cave. When she found her daughter there, she took her into her arms and the two of them cried. Afterwards she taught the girl what to say and went into hiding.

  "Soon the old monkey monster came back, in a gust of wind. He came into the cave and sniffed around, saying: `The smell of a stranger person! The smell of a stranger person! If I catch her, I will eat her up!'

  "The girl said: `Nonsense! There is no stranger person here. Only my mother came to visit us. She has a secret remedy that can cure your festering eyes.'

  "When the old monkey monster heard this, he was very glad. For many years his eyes had been red and watery. They bothered him a lot. So he asked eagerly: `Where is your mother? Quickly bring her in. I want to see her. I will not eat her!'

  "Hearing this, the mother came forward. She had gathered a lot of tree gum on her way, which she melted in a big wok and spread on a long piece of foot-binding cloth. She told the old monkey monster to sit still and shut his eyes while she put the medicine on. She wrapped the cloth round his head many times.

  "`You must keep your eyes shut and do not move for three days. If you move or open your eyes before that, the medicine will not work and your eyes will never be cured!' After she said this, she took her daughter by the hand and the two of them sneaked out of the cave. They returned home safe and sound. Three days later when the old monkey monster tried to open his eyes, he couldn't. For the glue had dried up. The cloth stuck to the old monkey monster's hair and skin. He could never get it off and open his eyes. After that, the mother and the girl lived together for many, many happy years."

  I loved this story. Each time I listened to it, Aunty's voice made me sense the danger and I was a little scared. I imagined myself to be the little girl who was snatched away by an old monkey monster. Yet I knew that I was safe, for Aunty was holding me with both her arms. Aunty, I believed, loved me as much as the little girl's mother did, and she was every bit as smart and brave. In the future she could and she would save me from the grip of any monsters.

  Another scene I remembered was the pavement in Bern. In the spring when it rained, the pavement was covered with earthworms; I did not dare let my feet touch it. On such days Father would carry me to places on his shoulders, and I loved it there! My father by then was just over thirty. He was tall and handsome, always well dressed. I was very proud of him. He walked with long, springy steps on the sidewalk, overtaking other pedestrians. From time to time he rocked me a little. One step toward the left; one step toward the right. I was scared, so I held on tighter to his neck.

  Besides earthworms, I was afraid of numerous other things. For instance, at home people had to warn me before they flushed the toilet; Aunty had to make sure I was out of the kitchen before she put vegetables into a hot wok. On the playground I was afraid of the swing and nobody could make me climb to the top of the slide. The seesaw was better, but when my end went up, it had to move very slowly and never go any higher than Aunty's waist. The sandbox was the only place where I felt safe. As a result, each day I made more cakes than the baker from across the street.

  In winter after snow had fallen, sometimes Mother would take me to a small slope behind our house for sledding. I wore a little white fur coat and Mother a long green woolen overcoat. The new snow was soft. My footsteps were small and Mother's big. On our way we stopped beneath a leafless tree on which crimson apples hung. Pretty little birds were picking at them. Mother whistled to the birds and the little birds answered her. Then we were at the slope and the sled began to move. The wind blew into my face. I had to shut my mouth and hold my breath. Involuntary tears of fear fell down my cheeks like a little stream.

  Once our lives were really in danger, Aunty said. By then I was four. "One day," she said, "it was in May; your parents took us boating on a mountain lake. It was a nice day. Warm and sunny. Your father was half asleep. The boat drifted by itself. Suddenly he saw a sign-there was a waterfall downstream. Alarmed, he jumped up and tried to row the boat back. But he couldn't. At that place the lake narrowed. It was like a big river. The water was swift. Your mother tried to help. After a while, the sun was setting and no other people were in sight. We were all terribly frightened.

  "I held you tightly in my arms. I thought if we were to go down that waterfall, I would die with you. At that moment I was really sorry I had come all the way to this foreign country to die. It was so far away from home. Our spirits would be lost. We'd be hungry ghosts for eternity.

  "All this while your mother was furious; she scolded your father nonstop. Your father was furious to
o after a while. So he started to yell back. The two of them quarreled as if heaven and earth had been turned upside down. Yet in the meantime they rowed together as fast as they could."

  "What happened next? Did we go down the waterfall?" I asked.

  "Of course not, you silly child! We were rescued by a steamboat."

  "Aunty! Was I afraid at the time?"

  "No," she said, "you were asleep in my arms. I did not wake you up."

  So on the day when our lives were really in danger, I was the only one who was not afraid. I was glad to hear that. By then my parents took me out more often, to parks, restaurants, and theaters. This I liked very much, not because I was sophisticated enough to appreciate the food and the performances. It was because I had a feeling that the people I met liked me. Mother agreed with me a few years later when we talked about this.

  "People liked you because you were nice and sweet!" she said with a great deal of annoyance in her voice. "What has gotten into you and made you change so much after we returned to China that I can hardly recognize you?"

  I had no answer to her question. It was true that my temper changed for the worse when I reached the age of seven. Somehow I lost the desire to be a sweet little girl.

  My family went back to China when I was five. We traveled by train, on which we had a compartment to ourselves. Father, Mother, Aunty, and I each had a bed. My little brother, Lian, who was a baby, slept in a basket under Aunty's bed. Day after day I sat in front of the window to watch the scenery. The great cities of Europe were left behind. Vast wilderness of Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchuria rushed forward to welcome me back. Snow flakes in summer, tall grass to the end of the sky, yellow flowers, and blue lakes. Half a month later our train pulled into Yongding Gate Station in Beijing.