Old Town by Lin Zhe

the picture that went back furthest in time. It had been taken amid all the blooming flowers in the yard of the West Gate church. Grandma wore a white wedding dress. Grandpa stood stiff as a pen in his Western suit. Photographed together with the bride and groom were Pastor and Mrs. Chen and their one-year-old son, Enchun. On the back of the photograph was the following in my grandfather’s handwriting: Taken in early summer, 1930 .
    The three Chens had come from Beijing. 7 In the spring of that same year, they had accepted the invitation of the Old Town church organization to take up the resident pastorate of the West Gate church, and there they stayed for the rest of their lives. The Chens and the Lins have had a friendship that spans three generations. In my daughter Beibei’s veins flows Lin and Chen blood, but I don’t suppose this comes with any blessing from God, but rather from the curse of some mysterious crime, a thing I have been unable to free myself from my entire life.
    Next, the album shows my mother and my two uncles. The young “Western” doctor and his beautiful, young wife embrace and hug three lively and adorable-looking children—a happy and perfect life recorded in a faded photograph.
    Ninth Brother’s first clinic was established at Drum Tower, actually in what had been the Guo Family Cloth Shop. As the oldest Guo son was drinking himself into a perpetual stupor, he was incapable of handling the business. Nor could there be any great expectations from the other sons, so Second Sister’s mother let Ninth Brother turn the shop into his clinic. In the winter of their second year, they had a daughter. A father for the first time, Ninth Brother showed a fervor and enthusiasm that raised eyebrows among both the young and old in the Lin family. He actually stopped business and closed up the clinic to be with his wife during her month of confinement. The whole day long he would bury himself in the dimly lit room holding his child, unable to let go of her. Once in a while, though, he would have no choice but to leave to take care of some seriously ill person, and this was hard on him. From the Lin residence to the clinic was about a fifteen-minute walk, but he couldn’t bear even this short fifteen-minute distance from his wife and daughter. When the baby girl had completed her first full month, the young couple broke free of the big family residence and moved into the floor above the clinic. There they had two other children.
    Happy lives are mostly all alike. Unhappy ones all have their own unhappiness. This was the famous saying of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. The several years following their marriage were the happiest times my grandparents would have in their whole lives. There were only a few “tales of marvels” that could be passed down to us in the later generations, and even Great-Auntie, who loved to tell stories, couldn’t say the reason for this. 8 Although Ninth Brother insisted on giving free treatment to poor people, the clinic’s income wasn’t too bad. Second Sister still did some needlework handicraft to contribute to her mother’s household budget. By this time, she had already been baptized a Christian and every Sunday the family in all its neatest and most attractive attire went to the West Gate church to sing hymns. The doctor’s wife and the pastor’s wife often took turns in hosting demonstrations of the culinary arts. And very often the doctor and the pastor would discuss everything under the sun over a pot of warm, watered-down wine without ever exhausting all the topics they wanted to discuss.
    The ancients longed for the Land of Peach Blossoms, beyond our mundane world, but that place was not more idyllic than all of this. How could anyone expect that one day this happy existence, like a beautiful dream so cruelly interrupted, would vanish, never to return?
    The Happy Family Portraits could be counted on our fingers. The several old and young members of the whole