Peking Story by David Kidd

other part of their establishment. I, too, learned to appreciate the garden. Unlike a Japanese garden, which is made chiefly to be looked at, a Chinese one is meant to be walked in. It is a private landscape of careful deceptions, a deliberate reminder of those wet black-and-green mountains, the home of immortals and monkeys, found in Chinese paintings. In it, the wise man is able to see the world of dust and bustle as he thinks it should be seen — at a distance, and through leaves.
    I often walked in the garden of my wife’s home, and if I gathered no wisdom, at least I enjoyed the tree-shaded pebble paths, the bamboo groves (of which the family was particularly proud, because bamboo is rare in North China), and the cool blackness of the rock grottoes. At the time I lived there, the hydraulic mechanism installed to pump water from the well into the garden’s two pools had gone hopelessly out of repair. When the family holdings lost their value, Elder Brother, in his effort to economize, had tried to raise pigs in one of the pools, but they never seemed to thrive there, and after the night when one of them got out and had to be cornered, squealing and kicking, in the Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues, Elder Brother abandoned the project.
    Sometimes, in the summer of 1949, Aimee and I would sit on porcelain stools in the Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues, eating watermelon that had been cooled in a cage at the bottom of the well, and she would point out to me the distant peak of Mount T’ai — simulated there in the garden — or a nearer mountain range, in which we could see the fortress gate of the Western Pass. All this was no more than one or two hundred feet away from us, and I knew that I would have to bend my head to pass through the mighty Western Gate, and that I could climb to the top of Mount T’ai in about twenty seconds by way of a set of concealed stone steps on its far side. But sometimes, listening to Aimee as she showed me such things, I could see the garden as the artist who designed it over four hundred years ago intended it should be seen — as an immensity of space and distant mountains.
    The Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues, from which I was best able to see the illusions, stood in the center of the garden. Four slender wooden posts, riddled by dry rot, held up the pavilion’s heavy tile roof and elaborately bracketed eaves, and though the whole structure tilted slightly, it was able to maintain an equilibrium that defied time and age. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1950, the pavilion’s list toward the southwest (the malevolent direction) had become so noticeable that the family took it to be a bad omen.
    There was another omen in the garden that spring. For the first time in memory, the peach, plum, and cherry trees there bloomed at the same time, and the family, convinced that this had some deep significance, eventually decided it must be the garden’s way of saying farewell. Faced with a set of new and fiercer taxes, they had begun to concede defeat in their attempt to hold together, and were realizing that in a matter of months the mansion would have to be given up and the family scattered. So, although tempers had recently been short and arguments frequent, for the brief time of the garden’s blooming the family spoke quietly, with elegance and ease, in the way I imagined they had spoken long before. The complaints, the postures of despair, the threats of suicide or of death by starvation were set aside, and the family did what for them, that spring, was a very surprising thing. They decided to have a tea in the extravagantly blooming garden.
    The tea, in keeping with the spring’s lavishness, turned out to be a far larger affair than the family had at first anticipated. It became, in fact, a costume ball, arranged and paid for by Hetta Empson. Fond of the garden as we were, she was, if possible, even fonder. She would come just to sit there on moonlit