Where Once Were Qilin: Return to Nanjing

Nanjing is a portal to the past. My past, certainly.

On my inaugural trip to Nanjing in 1985, I was eighteen and traveling with my father. It was his first time back in China since his family fled in 1949 at the end of the civil war. We found his childhood home, a two-story gray brick building with an elegant tiled roof and sweeping eaves. I was thrilled to see family history come alive. Places I’d heard about in stories around the dinner table—or in arguments about the wars they’d lived through, who made what decision when, who nearly died and why—were now right before my eyes.

I’d heard so much about my grandmother’s house: She’d built it with her inheritance money after her mother died. She’d had to threaten to sue her own father to get her share. She’d designed it to look like her American dormitory at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she got her master’s. During the war, Japanese officers had been stationed in it. After the war, a White Russian had tried to turn it into a brothel. Now I could see it with my own eyes.

But my father was horrified to find it had been subdivided into multiple homes, the yard turned to dirt, the building in need of repair, nothing like the dream house of his childhood memories.

“China is so poor!” he shouted out loud in the street.

My second trip to Nanjing was as a student in 1988. I was twenty-one and came back alone. My grandmother’s house had already been torn down to make way for newer, taller buildings in the neighborhood. Still, I could bicycle around the city and recognize scenes from my grandparents’ photo albums: the fourteenth-century Gulou (Drum Tower), where artists displayed their paintings and students practiced their English; the plane tree-lined streets around the campus of Nanjing University, where the heavy black Flying Pigeon bicycles outnumbered the cars; the tall gray brick walls with red wooden doors that encircled schools, houses, and whole neighborhoods; the old men on the sidewalk who sold persimmons or crickets or cabbage, using an abacus and hand-weighted scale to measure their goods.

Being in Nanjing made me feel closer to my paternal grandparents, to the sense of wholeness they’d given to our family when they were still alive. When I was first born in California, they came to live with our family every summer. My first memories are Ye-ye, the earliest riser, getting me out of bed and taking me in a stroller around our neighborhood. I loved the sound of Ye-ye and Nai-nai calling to each other in Mandarin in our house, the smiles that lit upon their faces whenever I came into their room. After Ye-ye’s second heart attack, it was harder for them to travel to visit us, so we eventually moved to New Jersey to be closer to them.

Then, when I was twelve, my family moved far away to a predominantly white town in the Midwest. In my new school, I was bullied for being Chinese and white, for having Chinese facial features—a low bridge to my nose, a round face, even brown eyes and straight hair. This was a painful experience growing-up and became more so as I adjusted to life without my grandparents.

We could no longer have weekly dinners together at their favorite Chinese restaurant in New York City. They could no longer come to live with us during the winter break in the school year. Long distance phone calls were expensive and therefore rare. Worse, my grandparents could visit us in our home only once. When I was thirteen, Nai-nai died and Ye-ye fell into a deep depression. I was able to see him only once more before he died; I was nineteen.

Living in Nanjing, their erstwhile hometown for two years—first when I was an international student, then as an English teacher in a local high school—helped me to overcome that sadness. I still missed them, but I had a deeper understanding of their lives, of the culture they had left behind, and the ways that culture had shaped our family and myself. I saw the beauty of Nanjing, but also the sites of the Japanese-occupation and memorials to the suffering of the Chinese people. I could see the hardships that they had endured and overcome.

*

I am here in Nanjing, in the summer of 2018, after an absence of nearly thirty years.

At first, I can see only the changes, everything shiny and new and fast. My grandmother’s two-story house once seemed tall; now, skyscrapers thirty and forty stories high tower over the city. Billboards advertising Burberry, Chanel, Apple, and Huawei block the horizon line. Chicly-dressed young people hail rides from Didi Chuxing via app and a sparkling brand-new subway system whisks passengers across the city. The streets are full of new cars and clean buses; the few bicycles that remain can be rented online via smartphone.

Only the luxuriant plane trees are as I remember, canopies of green over the sweltering sidewalk. Gone are the old men who sat in the shade on plastic chairs, playing chess and selling fruit piled on tarps, putting persimmons and pears and tiny hairy mountain berries into cones of rolled newspaper.

Another generation gone to the other side, only my memories left.

I meet up with a former high school student of mine. He’s now married and the father of a six-year-old. When we try to go to our old school, we find an armed guard standing at the gate. It’s the national exam day, and so we go to Jiming Temple instead.

The temple’s complex is not far from the school. Back in the day, my students enjoyed playing video games at a nearby underground arcade built in a former air-raid shelter. Today, the temple has been reconstructed and new halls have been added. It’s a sprawling complex of yellow-tiled roofs and red walls that are worth their own stop on the subway system. Rows of port-a-potties stand in the giant parking lot to accommodate the temple’s many visitors.

With prosperity comes a desire for religion, my student says, and newly-rich Chinese like to give to the temple.

We sit in the tea shop to escape the heat and reminisce as crowds line up outside to bow before Guan Yin.

“What is the biggest change you’ve seen in the past thirty years?” I ask him.

He smiles and settles back to tell me a story about his father, who went to work in Iraq for a year in 1987. It was a rare opportunity for Chinese to travel in those days. He was only able to do it because he worked in a state-run chemical fertilizer company that had some kind of contract with the Iraqi government. His father was paid one thousand dollars for the entire year’s work and had to give ninety percent back to the Chinese government.

My student said, “All he got was a hundred dollars, but that’s a hundred dollars more than he would have had.”

His father did not want to waste this windfall, so he bought two color television sets.

One was for my student’s older sister because she was “of the marriageable age” and, in those days, you needed a color TV for the marriage. Then, to be fair, he bought another color TV set, exactly the same, for his son—my student—even though he was just entering high school. He was way too young to even be thinking about marriage, but his father figured it would still be good for his marriage in ten to fifteen years and, after all, when would he ever have another opportunity to earn a hundred dollars and buy a color TV again?

“They were not very big televisions, maybe twenty-four inches. And in a year or two, everyone had color televisions. And much bigger ones.” My student shakes his head ruefully and laughs at the memory. “In fact, the next year, he gave away the second television set to my uncle.”

My former student is a successful businessman now. His wife is also a successful businesswoman. They travel for business frequently; he mostly to South Asia, while she has been sent by her company to all over Eastern Europe, as well as the United States. Their lives are unimaginably different from their parents’ at the same age, in many ways better. However, the competition for slots in good schools is more intense. The cost of living and cost of tutoring and cost of extracurricular activities for their child are worries. Their daughter is in elementary school; his biggest worry, he says, is about how to prepare her for the future.

“I cannot imagine what the world will be like in one month’s time, much less ten years from now. There are so many changes all the time,” he says, shaking his head again, as though he still can’t believe it. “So I don’t even try. I live in the moment.”

Another generation gone to the other side, only my memories left.

Before returning to Nanjing, I was afraid that I would find my favorite parts of it torn down in the name of development, as in almost every other Chinese city. From Beijing to Shanghai to Chongqing, entire neighborhoods have been razed and rebuilt and displaced for decades. The 1930s Republican-era buildings on the Nanjing University campus are intact, much to my relief, and the swooping eaves of the tiled roofs are visible from a distance, now preserved as historic sites.

The ancient city wall is still present. It was built during the Ming Dynasty in the fourteenth century to keep out armies. In World War II, the invading Japanese Army bombed part of the wall and knocked it down. They executed Chinese prisoners en masse at each of the wall’s twelve gates during their eight-year occupation of the city. The wall was—is—a symbol of China’s ability to protect its people. The Japanese invaders used the wall as a symbol of China’s inability to do so.

As I stand on the wall, staring at the horizon with a drone flying overhead, I realize: All the villages that used to lie just outside the gates are gone, replaced with highways and high rises.

In those villages, there once were qilin. They were stone statues of mythical beasts—part lion, part deer, winged. Some dated from the Ming Dynasty, same as the wall, more than 600 years old; some even older.

Villagers would put red paper banners on the qilin for good luck during festivals. They would bring offerings of food, venerating the symbols of their ancestors, whom they expected to act as guardians over their lives. The qilin were like guardians to the past, bridging the border between the living and the dead.

In 1988, my art history professor at Nanjing University took our class on field trips to see all the ancient statues. We saw the qilin in the outlying villages; the thousand Buddhas carved into Qi Xia Mountain, each one beheaded by the Red Guards back in the ’60s; a Qing Dynasty stele’s calligraphy defaced by metal files.

“They were so stupid,” the professor said. “They even beheaded the statue of a worker carved into the mountain.” He shook his head. The abomination.

On this visit, the only qilin I see is in the Six Dynasties Museum. It is missing its head.

A poster on the museum wall shows pictures of qilin back in the villages. Where are they now? Were they destroyed in the mad rush to develop in the ’90s? Were they sold off to private collectors for profit? Or were they hidden in some museum vault?

What did it mean that now both the villages and the qilin were gone? This portal to the ancestors gone forever.

On this visit, the only qilin I see is in the Six Dynasties Museum. It is missing its head.

On my last day in the city, I dine at a trendy restaurant. It is a farewell dinner organized by the Dean of International Students at Nanjing University. He was the one who invited me to campus and to speak about my books, especially The Girl from Purple Mountain, which I wrote with my father about my grandmother’s life in Nanjing. This restaurant specializes in Nanjing treats: duck, eels, steamed dumplings, vegetables that can only be found in local ponds.

I learn that his wife, herself a professor of English, was a student at Nan Da the same years as I. In fact, we lived in the same dormitory on campus: she on the Chinese side, me on the side for foreign students. In those days, in the 1980s, the government still wanted to keep the Chinese people segregated from foreign influences. A guard stationed on the foreign side of the dorm would take down the ID of every Chinese student who tried to visit.

The foreign-student side of our dormitory had a hot water heater that worked for two hours a day, during which we could take showers. We had two hours of heat in our bedrooms during the afternoon, which was worthless since we were in class. It snowed in the winter in Nanjing, but the government did not apportion coal for heating to cities south of the Yangtze. I remember how cold it was in winter, when my roommates and I took to burning wooden chopsticks in a metal basin in the middle of the room to generate some heat.

The Chinese side, the professor says, had no hot water and no heat. “I didn’t discover the foreigners had hot water until my senior year!” A friend once took her to the fifth floor, where there was a hole in the shared wall. They could peer through the border separating the Chinese students from the foreigners and see the water heater on the other side.

Now, there is heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer. Students today cannot imagine how students lived just a generation ago, says the professor.

We talk about how the city has changed since we were students. I noticed everyone seemed to have dogs, I tell them, people carrying their pets proudly on the streets and into cafes. Back in the ’80s, such pets were still illegal, considered bourgeois affectations, and a public health hazard since rabies vaccines were rare.

“I was afraid the city wall would be gone,” I say to them. “I was afraid they’d tear down the old campus.”

The professor laughs. “No, this is our history.”

“The qilin are gone.” I tell her of my visit to the city wall. “Now the qilin are in the museum, not the villages.” I am being ridiculous perhaps, but it makes me sad.

“Yes, the living history is gone,” she says, understanding. “It seems all the changes so far have come from the West. Pets, shopping centers, cars. What will be the changes in the next thirty years? Maybe, this time, from China.”

Before dinner is over, we exchange contact information via WeChat. She helps another professor find the app to scan my QR code so that we can keep in touch.

He shakes his head. “I’m too old for this world. I don’t know how to do any of these things.”

“It’s okay,” she says, patiently, bending over his phone. “I’ll show you.”

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