family, or even the several dozen of them, sitting neatly and evenly in the photo studio for a remembrance portrait, meant there were among them those who were going away. And whether this departure was for good or for ill no one could foretell, so in some places it is commonly considered taboo to take Happy Family Portraits. Grandma and Grandpa and their three children’s earliest Happy Family Portrait was a fore-shadowing of the upheaval and calamities to come.
In the winter of 1937, Ninth Brother brought the entire family into the photo studio at the Drum Tower. In the solemn expressions of all five family members were clearly traced anxiety and bewilderment. Behind them was the studio’s backdrop of painted scenery but prominent above all else was the army uniform Ninth Brother was wearing. He was tightly holding his daughter to him. This precious daughter was the thing he most loved and worried about all his life. Their young sons weren’t yet five years old, but they seemed to know that a great disaster was looming over them. Their brows were furrowed in an expression that showed that tears would soon fall.
What force could have made frail bookworm and sentimental, family loving Ninth Brother, husband and father—who didn’t even know what was going on outside his own window—cast aside the wife and children he felt he never loved enough, and head for the battlefront?
2.
W HEN N INTH B ROTHER told his wife that he wanted to go to the front lines up north as an army doctor, she supposed he was just expressing some kind of general wish. She also knew that war was going on in the north, and Ninth Brother had lived in the north and so inevitably, he would be rather more concerned and worried than someone who had never left Old Town. But that was the north, after all. Wasn’t everything just fine in our Old Town? This had always been a blessed place. The many epochal changes during the dynasties had never brought the clash of arms here. People in Old Town believed that even if the sky collapsed, it wouldn’t fall on their heads.
Everything in Old Town, with its eternal spring weather, followed the prescribed order. Children grew older by the day. That summer their daughter Baohua entered primary school. Ninth Brother bought a bicycle and every day he would use it to take her to and from school. In those years, bicycles may have been even rarer and more prestigious than today’s BMWs. Ninth Brother rode it none too steadily and so he would have to push Baohua along the bustling streets to school. He said that by the time the two boys went to school, his bicycle-pedaling skills would be excellent and he could take the three of them on it, just like he’d seen at a street-side circus in Shanghai. How could he have possibly forsaken his children to go off to those distant parts?
Right up to when Ninth Brother received his uniform from the local government office, Second Sister thought he had just gotten some official sinecure or another, like those people on Stipend Lane and Officials Lane who once “ate the Emperor’s grain,” as they used to say. Every day he would go out early and come back late, and this family stayed as tight-knit as tight could be.
Only when Ninth Brother proposed taking a Happy Family Portrait at the photo studio did Second Sister actually feel that matters weren’t as simple as she had supposed. Returning home, she asked her husband, “Would you really leave us?” Instead of answering her, Ninth Brother just turned to look out the window. She saw pain in the contours of his clear-cut profile. Yes, he really is going . She drew in a breath of cool air through her parted lips to stifle a cry. She had been wallowing in bliss over the past seven or eight years without the slightest doubt that these days would continue all her life, and that no power short of death could snatch away her happiness. Then, all of a sudden, her sheep-like, good husband had changed into a hard-hearted man
In the winter of 1937, Ninth Brother brought the entire family into the photo studio at the Drum Tower. In the solemn expressions of all five family members were clearly traced anxiety and bewilderment. Behind them was the studio’s backdrop of painted scenery but prominent above all else was the army uniform Ninth Brother was wearing. He was tightly holding his daughter to him. This precious daughter was the thing he most loved and worried about all his life. Their young sons weren’t yet five years old, but they seemed to know that a great disaster was looming over them. Their brows were furrowed in an expression that showed that tears would soon fall.
What force could have made frail bookworm and sentimental, family loving Ninth Brother, husband and father—who didn’t even know what was going on outside his own window—cast aside the wife and children he felt he never loved enough, and head for the battlefront?
2.
W HEN N INTH B ROTHER told his wife that he wanted to go to the front lines up north as an army doctor, she supposed he was just expressing some kind of general wish. She also knew that war was going on in the north, and Ninth Brother had lived in the north and so inevitably, he would be rather more concerned and worried than someone who had never left Old Town. But that was the north, after all. Wasn’t everything just fine in our Old Town? This had always been a blessed place. The many epochal changes during the dynasties had never brought the clash of arms here. People in Old Town believed that even if the sky collapsed, it wouldn’t fall on their heads.
Everything in Old Town, with its eternal spring weather, followed the prescribed order. Children grew older by the day. That summer their daughter Baohua entered primary school. Ninth Brother bought a bicycle and every day he would use it to take her to and from school. In those years, bicycles may have been even rarer and more prestigious than today’s BMWs. Ninth Brother rode it none too steadily and so he would have to push Baohua along the bustling streets to school. He said that by the time the two boys went to school, his bicycle-pedaling skills would be excellent and he could take the three of them on it, just like he’d seen at a street-side circus in Shanghai. How could he have possibly forsaken his children to go off to those distant parts?
Right up to when Ninth Brother received his uniform from the local government office, Second Sister thought he had just gotten some official sinecure or another, like those people on Stipend Lane and Officials Lane who once “ate the Emperor’s grain,” as they used to say. Every day he would go out early and come back late, and this family stayed as tight-knit as tight could be.
Only when Ninth Brother proposed taking a Happy Family Portrait at the photo studio did Second Sister actually feel that matters weren’t as simple as she had supposed. Returning home, she asked her husband, “Would you really leave us?” Instead of answering her, Ninth Brother just turned to look out the window. She saw pain in the contours of his clear-cut profile. Yes, he really is going . She drew in a breath of cool air through her parted lips to stifle a cry. She had been wallowing in bliss over the past seven or eight years without the slightest doubt that these days would continue all her life, and that no power short of death could snatch away her happiness. Then, all of a sudden, her sheep-like, good husband had changed into a hard-hearted man
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