A Return to the Frontier
When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when an efficient-looking man in neat western clothes approached me. "You are Mrs. Richard Nixon?" He said in English.
I had seen many photographs of the blonde Mrs. Nixon and never imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a woman's inability to disbelieve a compliment altogether, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there was those glasses. "No, I am sorry," I said, and he walked away to search among the other passengers.
It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa, even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to greet her.
"Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today?" I asked my friends Mr. And Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all.
"No, we haven't heard," Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who mistook me for her and what a joke that was. "Um," he said unsmiling. Then he said somewhat embarrassedly, "There's a man who is always hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. He's not quite sane."
I laughed, then went under Formosa's huge wave of wistful yearning for the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore in some ways a foe.
"How does it feel to be back?" Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never been there before, they were going along with the official assumption that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion came over me.
"It feels like dreaming." And taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, "But it's not possible!" Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said, "But you are ghosts."
Mrs. Chu told me as we left the airport, "This is an ugly city, but the minute you get out of town it is beautiful."
They lodged me in a mountain inn. I got the General's Suite, where the generals stay when they come uphill to report to the Generalissimo, who lives a few steps away across the road. The suite was reached through a series of deserted little courtyards, with its own rock garden and lotus pond. In the silence there was just the sound of the evening drizzle on the banana palm and in the bathroom a tap of sulphur water constantly running out of a stone lion mouth and splashing over the rim of the cement tank. There were rattan furniture on the tatami flooring and a wardrobe and bed with stained sheets. I told myself not to be fastidious. But there were bedbugs. Finally I had to get up near dawn to sleep on the ledge of the honor recess, where in Japanese living rooms the best vase and picture scroll are displayed. The maid was frightened when she come in the morning and could not find me.
It was plain that the generals had feminine companionship while spending the night awaiting audience with the Generalissimo. I wondered at the ease of procuring girls almost next door to that Christian and Confucian founder of the New Life Movement. Surely it was unseemly with"Heaven's countenance only a foot away," as we used to describe an audience with the emperor. After I left Taipei for the countryside, I realized that prostitution was more open on this land than perhaps anywhere else in the world. In a small-town newspaper five or six advertisements of this type appeared in one day: "Joy and Happiness Prostitutes' Domicile, 1st class. 124 Shin Ming Road. Swarms of pretty girls like clouds, offering the best services."
In the countryside Formosa peels back, showing older strata. There were more native Formosans than refugees. The mixed emotions of my homecoming of sorts gave way to pure tourist enthusiasm.
From time to time Mrs. Chu, sitting next to me in the bus, whispering next to me in the bus, whispered urgently, "shandi, shandi!" I just caught a glimpse of a shandi, or mountain dweller, a gray little wraith with whiskers tattooed on her cheeks carrying a baby on her back and loitering outside a shop along the highway. "Shandi, shandi!" Again the breathless little cry and a nudge. I saw gypsylike children in ragged T-shirts and skirts, carrying smaller children. "They all come to town when there's a Japanese picture on," Mrs. Chu said.
"Oh, do they speak Japanese?"
"Very well."
Many of the bus passengers talked Japanese. They were the early Chinese settlers, and a surprising number of their young people still spoke Japanese. The bus stopped at what seemed to be the middle of nowhere and a young man got off. The conductor followed him. Suddenly there was a fight, the two rolling over and over on the wayside. "Chigaru yo! Chigaru yo!" I could make out the one Japanese word the young man kept shouting: "Mistake! Mistake!" The driver got off to help beat him. The passenger learned that this man was always stealing rides. I thought how un-Chinese these people were. In Hong Kong I had seen a streetcar conductor following a free rider to the street and grad hold of his necktie, in place of the pigtail which used to be the first thing reached for in a brawl. But that was just a scuffle and exchange of words. Last year a bus conductor was taken to the police station on the complain of a woman he had hit with his ticket puncher, a murderous tool conductor s were forever rattling to remind people to buy tickets. But there were never any real fights like this.
Finally the driver and conductor let the man go. He got on his feet panting and dusting himself. They drove off. He stood at attention in his torn khaki shirt and saluted the bus as it passed. He did not look old enough to have been in the army in Japanese days, but that reverence was distinctly Japanese. Oddly enough, it also reminded me of the Communist Chinese lining up all the porters, sweepers, and peddlers on the railway platform, each presenting his broom, pole, and basket like arms as the train pulled out. Workers have been told to love their machine, but to have them pay their respects to it in this little ritual seemed strange.
From Formosa I went on to Hong Kong, which I had not seen for six years. The city was being torn down and rebuilt into high apartment buildings. Whole streets were dug up, with a postbox buried up to its neck, still functioning. The refugees were settled down, hoping only to live out their lives in Hong Kong. The younger generation speak Cantonese in school and refuse to speak anything else at home, a good excuse not to talk to their parents that other teenagers may envy.
The more or less well-to-do homes I saw were getting increasingly Americanized, with amahs becoming too expensive and washing machines taking their place alone with the lastest-model refrigerators and hi-fi phonographs bought on the installment plan. Christmas had become a great occasion for gifts and parties for non-Christians too. Boys and girls handed each other Christmas cards in school. One girl wrote to a woman columnist: "I am nineteen years old. My father and I escaped from north China a year ago, crossing the country with great difficulty. We made the last stretch to Macao in a small boat which was fired on by the Communists. My father covered me with his body so he got wounded and died in the hospital in Macao. I came to Hong Kong, where a friend of father's got me a job paying about HK$100 a month [less than twenty American dollars], just enough to keep alive and rent a bunk. I am the only one without Christmas in all Hong Kong. Please tell me if I should go back the mainland."
Side by side with harrowing escapes like this, there is a lot of what seems to be needless and fool-hardy traffic of refugees going back for visits. "We've grown poor from sending parcels," my landlady told me once with a little laugh. She never could leave off explaining why they had to take in a lodger. She and her husband set both sets of parents and other dependents noodles, pop rice, preserved meats and herbs, sugar, soy, peanut oil, and soap each month and clothing in season. Of one brand of British-made chicken cubes, her mother-in-law had written ecstatically: "These cubes have solved all the problems of our two meals a day." The sugar they dissolved in water and drank as a tonic. Her brother, in a labor camp for harboring a friend accused of being a Nationalist spy, is still able to write her asking for pills for his ailing kidney and swollen legs. Her brother, in a labor camp for harboring a friend accused of being a Nationalist spy, is still able to write her asking for pills for his ailing kidney and swollen legs. Her younger sister is doctor assigned to work in the country. "She has to go out on sick calls at night, where it's pitch dark and the ground is uneven and she's afraid of snakes. You know how young girls are," she said, just as she apologized for her daughters monopolizing the bathroom: "You know how young girls are."
I was there to see a great packing. The landlady had a relative going back-a woman in her seventies-who could take things in for them. The landlady's husband wrestled with loads and ropes all over the kitchen floor. She baked a cake and made stewed pork.
"They can use the pot too," she said.
"How is one to carry a pot of stewed pork all the way to Shanghai?"
"It will be frozen; the train is a refrigerator."
She got up at dawn to see the old lady off, and she had to go alone to help carry the luggage past the inspections at the Lohu border. The next day she cried out when she came upon me: "Ha-ya, Miss Chang! I almost didn't come back."
"But what happened?"
"Huh-yee-ya! To begin with, there were altogether too many things. The old lady's fault, too -she had so many things of her own. Oil drums, crates of salted fish, whole cartons of cans. Clothes, bedding, pots and pans, enough to furnish a house. The customs man was losing his temper. Then he came upon some change in her purse, twenty, thirty cents of Jen Ming Piao she had with her when she came out last time and forgot to get rid of. You're not supposed to take Communist money in, so all hell broke loose. 'Where did this come from? Ha?' And 'What do you mean by this? Ha?' Turned on me now: 'Who are you? AH?'" My landlady screwed up her slant-eyed babe face to roar out the "Ahs" and "Has". "Ai-ya-I said I knew nothing about this, I just came to see her off, but all the time I was worried to death." She frowned and clucked with annoyance and dropped her voice to a whisper. "This old lady had dozens of nylon stockings sewn inside her thick padded gown."
"To sell?" I asked.
"No, just to give as presents; women wear them inside their slacks."
"But why? When they can't even be seen?" And with all the hunger we heard was around, I thought.
"Not full-length ones." The landlady gestured toward her calves. "For the wives of officials. She likes to bring everybody something. Very capable old lady. She imports movies made in Hong Kong. What does she want so much money for? Ha? Seventy and no children? Ha?"
I remembered coming out ten years ago, walking the last stretch across the Lohu Bridge with its rough wood floor closed in on both sides by guardhouses and fences. A group of us stood waiting after the Hong Kong police on the other side of the barbed wire had taken our papers away to be studied. They took a long time over it. It was midsummer. The Hong Kong policeman, a lean tall Cantonese with monstrous dark glasses, looked cool and arrogant as he paced around in his uniform and shorts, smartly belted and creased. Beside us stood the Communist sentry, a round-cheeked north country boy in rumpled baggy uniform. After an hour in the hot sun the young soldier muttered angrily, speaking for the first time, "These people! Keep you out here in this heat. Go stand in the shade." He jerked his head at the patch of shade a little distance back. But none of us would look at him. We just smiled slightly, pressing close to the wire fence as if afraid to be left out. Still, for a moment I felt the warmth of race wash over me for the last time.
That fateful bridge has often been compared to the Naiho Bridge between the realms of the living and the dead. Like most clichés, it is true when you experience it yourself. It makes me impatient to hear westerners quibble about the free world not being really free. Too bad that many of us have to go back over the bridge when we can't make a living outside.
I have an aunt who has stayed in Shanghai because she could not leave her new house. Her son, just out of college, joined his father in Hong Kong but did not like it there. He went back in 1952, just when I was about to leave. His mother took him to have his fortune told one evening and I went along. He would find a job soon, the fortuneteller said. But there might be trouble. He might go to prison. The prediction sounded reasonable at the time, with a movement on against businessmen and many suicides and arrests. The youngish fortuneteller looked like a shop assistant in his gabardine gown. I had no confidence in him and resolutely avoided his eye although I needed badly to have my own fortune told.
My cousin got a small job in Peking as predicted. Life was hard, he wrote his mother. Get married, his mother wrote back. It's the only way to have some happiness. But he was a quiet boy, slow to make up his mind. Ten years later when I saw his father in Hong Kong this time, I heard the son had wanted to get out again. Checking his application for permit to leave, the authorities seized on the fact that he had once joined a Nationalist group in college. He was sentenced to three years' house arrest in his mother's modernistic mansion, which they took the opportunity to search, probing the sofas for American dollars. He has all comforts, even servants to stand in line for the daily rations. But three years with Mother is evidently considered enough punishment.
I heard about my mother's family from on of my uncle's married daughters, the only one out. The other two stayed in because their husbands, a doctor and the son of a high Nationalist official, chose to stay. One of the sisters had died.
"So did my brother's wife," said my cousin in Hong Kong. "And both men remarried before their wives' bones were cold. Father died of cancer after losing everything in the land reform. Mother is wretched living with Brother. He doesn't earn enough and his new wife is a shrew. We Huangs are finished."
Looking back, I saw how my family and relatives had all been taught by our ancestors to hang onto land, the only clean and solid thing, by comparison to which all other possessions are showy, immoral, therefore impermanent. No matter what fools one's children were, as long as they did not slap land deeds on a gambling table they were safe. Despite ancestral admonitions, in time of course all their descendants tried their hands at other investments for better and quicker profits. Many soon found they were not clever enough and resigned themselves to the yearly income from the land-cut down by wars, famines, inflations-and grew poorer and poorer. The Communists merely hastened the end.
No one I know is in a commune or knows anybody who is in one, with the exception of a Cantonese amah who went back to sweep the graves his spring. Her family belongs to the village commune. It is still the farmers, always the worst off, who are getting the worst of it. Having heard of the food shortage, the amah brought in a bit of cooking oil and salted fish of her own use.
When she arrived for a twenty day visit, the commune allowed her to buy a large quantity of rice and small quantities of cooking oil and pork as a special favor. The pork was divided among her family and neighbors because they had not tasted meat all year. So went her salted fish. Her last ten days there she lived on snails that a little girl gathered for her from a pond.
There was no community dining hall. Everybody queued up with cans to get the rice and what went with it, served through two holes dug in the kennel-sized temple of the earth god. When they got home the food was cold, of course.
Everyday at four in the morning a man beat a gong to summon everybody to the fields. Breakfast at nine. Work at ten. Lunch at twelve. Work again at one. Supper at six. Work again at seven. But not in the fields this time-usually it was carrying coal or mud. Quit at ten at night. Sometimes "leap forward" to twelve midnight. No Sundays or holidays, only a few days off at the New Year. This despite the slogan "Let the farmers rest." Wages varied from a dollar something to fifty or sixty cents Jen Ming Piao a month. Medicines had been free but now you buy your own. Herd doctors were available but herbs are scarce.
We Chinese have always been at our best within a rigid frame, even in poetry writing. It's when we are most hemmed in that we seem able to rise above ourselves. After twenty centuries of rule by the family we have been free for perhaps twenty years, and it has not been a pleasant time for many of us, full of conflicts and self-doubts. Now the state has taken the place of the big family, coming into every moment and aspect of life with its familiar persuasive pressure. The sheep has returned to the fold. Even hunger can feel right-up to a point.
Those who live near Macao swim a mile or escape by sampan in bands sometimes as big as a hundred, fighting the machine guns of pursuing motorboats with sharpened bamboo poles. But they will not stay put and fight. The trouble with us Chinese is that we are too sensible. Sixty thousand crashed the land border to Hong Kong last May. The border guards who had shot at smaller numbers evidently held back because the crowds were too big, the government having always avoided massacres if possible. After this the communes were modified but not abandoned. There is already talk now of their being revived in the area around Canton.
Advance two steps, retreats a step-Mao Tse-tung has said this is his way of making progress. Whether dance or march, the people drag on, hoping to outlive their tormentors.
张爱玲语录
我们下一代同我们比较起来，损失的比获得的多。例如：他们不能欣赏《红楼梦》。
“人性”是最有趣的书，一生一世看不完。
最可厌的人，如果你细加研究，结果总发现他不过是个可怜人。
不知听多少胖人说过，她从前像我那年纪的时候比我还要瘦――似乎预言将来我一定比她们还要胖。 按：爱玲不食人间烟火，从前瘦，现在苗条，将来也没有发胖的危险。
“才”、“貌”、“德”都差不多一样短暂。像ｘｘ，“娶妻娶德”，但妻子越来越唠叨，烦得他走投无路。
书是最好的朋友。唯一的缺点是使近视加深，但还是值得的。
有些书喜欢看，有些书不喜欢看――像奥亨利的作品――正如食物味道恰巧不合胃口。
喜欢看张恨水的书，因为不高不低。高如《红楼梦》、《海上花》，看了我不敢写。低如“ｘｘ”、“ｘｘ”看了起反感。也喜欢看《歇浦潮》这种小说。不过社会小说之间分别很大。
不喜欢看王小逸的书，因为没有真实感，虽然写得相当流利，倒情愿看“闲草野花”之类的小说。
要做的事情总找得出时间和机会；不要做的事情总找得出藉口。
回忆永远是惆怅的。愉快的使人觉得可惜已经完了，不愉快的想起来还是伤心。最可喜莫如“克服困难”，每次想起来都重新庆幸。
一个知已就好像一面镜子，反映出我们天性中最优美的部分来。
一个人在恋爱时最能表现出天性中崇高的品质。这就是为什么爱情小说永远受人欢迎――不论古今中外都一样。
我有一阵子不同别人接触，看见人就不知道说什么好。如果出外事，或者时常遇到陌生人，慢慢会好一点――可是又妨碍写作。
有人说：不觉得时间过去，只看见小孩子长大才知道。我认为有一个更好的办法，就是每到月底拿薪水――知道一个月又过去了。但从来没有过这种经验。 按：现在爱玲可以靠每半年结版税知道，只是相隔时间长一点。
“秋色无南北，人心自浅深”，这是我祖父的诗。
替别人做点事，又有点怨，活着才有意思，否则太空虚了。
女明星、女演员见我面总劈头就说：“我也喜欢写作，可惜太忙。”言外之意，似乎要不是忙着许多别的事情――如演戏――她们也可以成为作家。
有人共享，快乐会加倍，忧愁会减半。
搬家真麻烦！可是一想起你说过：“以前我每次搬家总怨得不得了，但搬后总觉得：幸亏搬了！”我就得到一点安慰。
我故意不要家里太舒齐，否则可能：（一） 立刻又得搬家（二） 就此永远住下去，两者皆非所愿。
你们卧室的小露台像“庐山一角”，又像“壶中天地”。
从前上海的橱窗比香港的值得看，也许白俄多，还有点情调。 按：近年香港也有值得大看特看的橱窗了。
教书很难――又要做戏，又要做人。
这几天总写不出，有如患了精神上的便秘。
写了改，抄时还要重改，很不合算。
人生恨事：
（一）海棠无香；（二）鲥鱼多刺；（三）曹雪芹＜红楼梦＞残缺不全；（四）高鹗妄改――死有余辜。 按：前三句用在＜红楼梦未完＞一文中，重抄时差一点删掉，后来我说：“如果你不用，我用。”爱玲就用了。
她的眼睛总使我想起“涎瞪瞪”这几字。
很多女人因为心里不快乐，才浪费，是一种补偿作用。例如丈夫对她冷淡，就乱花钱。
·听你说她穿什么衣服，有如看照相簿。面孔已经熟悉，只要用想象拿衣服配上去就可以。
有些作家写吃的只捡自己喜欢的。我故意写自己不喜欢的，如面（又快又经济）、茶叶蛋、蹄膀。
别人写出来的东西像自己，还不要紧；只怕比自己坏，看了简直当是自己“一时神智不清”写的，那才糟呢！
写小说非要自己彻底了解全部情形不可（包括人物、背景的一切细节 ），否则写出来像人造纤维，不像真的。
写完一章就开心，恨不得立刻打电话告诉你们，但那时天还没有亮，不便扰人清梦。可惜开心一会儿就过去了，只得逼着自己开始写新的一章。
我这人只有一点同所有女人一样，就是不喜欢买书。其余的品质――如善妒、小气――并不仅限于女人，男人也犯的。在乱世中买书，丢了一批又一批，就像有些人一次又一次投机失败，还是不肯罢手。等到要仓皇逃离，书只能丢掉，或三钱不值两钱地卖掉，有如女人的首饰，急于脱手时只能削价贱卖；否则就为了那些书而生根，舍不得离去，像ｘｘｘ那样困居国内。我从来没有遇到过一个像某些男人那么喜欢买书的女人，女人总觉得随便买什么都比买书好。 结论是：一个女人如果肯默不出声，不云干涉男人买书，可以说经得起爱情的考验。
办杂志，好像照顾嗷嗷待哺的婴孩，非得按时喂他吃，喂了又喂，永远没有完 我一听见ｘｘ的计划就担心这一点。
最讨厌是自以为有学问的女人和自以为生得漂亮的男人。
本来我以为这本书的出版，不会像当初第一次出书时那样使我快乐得可以飞上天，可是现在照样快乐。我真开心有你们在身边，否则告诉谁呢？
狂喜的人，我还能想象得出他们的心理；你们这种谦逊得过分的人，我简直没法了解！
我小时候没有好衣服穿，后来有一阵拼命穿得鲜艳 ，以致博得“奇装异服”的“美名”。穿过就算了，现在也不想了。
这首诗显然模仿梁文星的作品，有如猴子穿着人的衣服，又像又不像。
我喜欢的书，看时特别小心，外面另外用纸包着，以免污损封面，不喜欢的就不包。这本小说我并不喜欢，不过封面实在好看，所以还是包了。
这张脸好像写得很好的第一章，使人想看下去。
即使是家中珍藏的宝物，每过一阵也得拿出来，让别人赏玩品评，然后自己才会重新发现它的价值。
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