Free Peking Story by David Kidd Page A

of prisoners were at work on the road, carrying stones and pouring tar. They were all dressed in blue cadre uniforms with large numbers painted in whitewash on the backs. Fine clouds of Peking’s pervasive dust hung about them.
    I was watching the prisoners’ faces as my pedicab passed, and suddenly I saw Lao Pei. He was in a marching line, and he looked fatter than when I had last seen him. Like the rest, he was singing one of the new Communist songs without much enthusiasm. So the jails had got him at last! He had been picked up for begging, I suppose, or perhaps for another extortion, this time with a less vulnerable victim. My pedicab passed too quickly for him to notice me. As I crossed the plaza in front of the Imperial Palace, where the great red Communist flags whipped in the wind, I thought that the gifted, hysterical cook I remembered bleeding for the woes of China seemed somehow saner and more real than this Lao Pei, freshly numbered and neatly dressed in his criminal-cadre suit, marching along in the dust from one tar bucket to another.

RED GATES AND WATER DEVILS
    M Y WIFE’S Aunt Chin was only an in-law of the Yu family, like me, but where I had nothing more in the way of ancestry to offer than Virginia and Kentucky pioneer forebears, Aunt Chin traced her pure Manchu descent from an empress of China. In 1948, when I first knew Aunt Chin, I was a little afraid of her, and we didn’t really become friendly until the summer of 1949 after I took up residence in the mansion. Aunt Chin, who was childless, had lived in her own suite of rooms there since her husband’s death, some thirty years before. She had used no make-up in those thirty years, and she wore her heavy gray hair in a severe, straight-cut bob. The family respected her as much for the sharpness of her tongue as for the luster of her ancestry. They also considered her an authority on the history and lore of Peking and, in fact, she was an inexhaustible well of information — true, false, and absurd — about the city.
    Aunt Chin lived with a companion, a mute who had never married and whom we called “Auntie Hu.” She depended for her contact with outsiders on Aunt Chin, with whom she was able to communicate by some means too subtle for us to divine. When Auntie was unoccupied, her eyes followed Aunt Chin in whatever she was doing, watching for a moment where her services might be needed. I remember one autumn day before I had been formally introduced to them, coming upon the two old ladies in the garden, their arms out-stretched, twirling in the fallen leaves. I retreated, so as not to spoil their fun.
    Even after I had been formally introduced, they remained decidedly cool toward me until they discovered that I not only could play cards but, with Aimee, completed a foursome at bridge — a game dear to their hearts.
    Aunt Chin kept cats, had asthma, and seldom left the house, or even her own rooms. Gambling and gossip were her only recreations, and after she and I became friends, my wife and I often played bridge or mah-jongg with her most of the night. Sometimes she would interrupt these sessions, and, an asthma cigarette between her lips, a row of ivory tiles of a deck of cards under her fingertips, she would talk.
    â€œI bought that radio in 1937 to hear the hour-by-hour news of the Japanese invasion,” she might say, indicating a cabinet against the wall, “and I haven’t turned it on since. When the Japanese came south from Manchuria, they entered China through the gate in the Great Wall at Shanhaikwan. Our stupid generals left the gate open, and the dwarfs marched through. If we had closed that gate, the Japanese could
never
have got into China.”
    Aunt Chin shared with many old-fashioned Chinese an unquestioning faith in walls. Peking has always cherished this faith, and anyone living behind its massive walls, moats, and double gates cannot entirely escape a sense of security, however false.