The city, however, does not tell its part, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.



 



Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities  



 



On April 28, 1938, the Western Massachusetts towns of Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich received a notice informing them that they were no longer in existence. “By the terms of Chapter 321, Act 1927,” it began, “you are hereby notified that the corporate existence of the aforesaid towns ceased at 12 o’clock midnight, April 27th.” Town officers were instructed not to carry on any municipal functions after that date, only to do “such acts as are necessary to affect the transfer of properties of the municipalities to the Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission.” The letter was signed by R. Nelson Molt, the commission’s secretary.



This was no great surprise to the inhabitants of these towns. Some years before, the state of Massachusetts had decided to flood the area then covered by the four rural municipalities in a grand solution to the increasing need for water in the ever-growing greater Boston area. Residents of the Swift River Valley watched in disbelief as state officials, engineers, then surveyors, and eventually lumberjacks swarmed over their land and began the long process of taking it from them. The construction of the reservoir would be one of the most ambitious civil works projects in history, but it would result in the forced removal of all residents in each of the four communities.



The enormous Quabbin Reservoir (the name was taken from a Nipmuck word roughly meaning “place of many waters”) would supply water to Boston and the many burgeoning suburbs that had, at the time of the District Water Supply Commission’s decision, swelled to proportions that strained the resources of the city.



Historically, Boston had always struggled to bring in enough water to adequately supply its residents. It had first seen the need to reach outside its municipal boundaries for water as early as the late 1700s, when pipes were laid between the city and Jamaica Pond in Roxbury. Disputes some thirty years later led the city to look instead to Long Pond in Natick. Rapid industrial and population growth, however, soon necessitated diverting water from the Sudbury River, and when this proved futile, the subsequent creation of the Wachusett Reservoir on the Nashua River. This in turn would prove sufficient for only thirty years after its construction in 1908. A more sustainable answer to the water problem was desperately needed.



The creation of an enormous reservoir in western Massachusetts seemed to be an ideal—if grandiose—long-term solution: the topography of the Swift River Valley was such that a couple of well-placed dams at the southern end could turn the whole region (an area of roughly 40 square miles) into a gigantic bowl with the capacity to hold 412 billion gallons of water. Aqueducts and an impressive system of tunnels would move the water east to Boston and the suburbs, and all that would have to be cleared out in the process was a few small towns. The plan was, in many respects, a resounding success—the project created much-needed public works jobs during the depths of the Great Depression and today more than 2.5 million people draw their water supply from the Quabbin reservoir—but the success came at a great cost to 2,500 people who would lose their hometowns forever.



Many could only sit back helplessly as their trees were clear-cut, their buildings razed or removed, and their dead relatives exhumed and relocated. Over 7,500 bodies were moved from the cemeteries of the Swift River Valley and reinterred elsewhere. The living lost homes, jobs, and history with little to no provisions made by the state for their aid or benefit.



One woman, forced to leave Greenwich with her family as a young girl, remembers,“wishing that the Boston folks would choke on their first glass of water from the Quabbin.” Another resident, quoted in Evelina Gustafson’s particularly heartbreaking 1940 book on the then-recent disappearance of the towns, said “with tear dimmed eyes…‘I little thought that one day these childhood haunts would be closed to me forever.’”  The only hint of the human consequences of this civil engineering project to appear in the near-500 pages of the Federal Writers Project’s otherwise effusive 1937 publication Massachusetts: A Guide to its People and Places is a note that says, “The route south of New Salem will be changed somewhat when the Quabbin Reservoir occupies the valley.”



The meetings during the planning stages of the project took place in Boston, on the correct prediction that the residents of the doomed communities would not have the means to travel to the city to make their voices heard. This set an unhappy precedent for how the concerns of the valley’s residents would be considered. The people whose lives were so inextricably connected with this land would ultimately have little to no say in the circumstances of its destruction.



Their fate is often overlooked, however: most histories of the Quabbin focus on the event as a triumph of civil engineering, writing off its indisputably tragic aspects as the inevitable side effects of progress. These were decisions made in the years just before the Great Depression, a time of an increasingly modern America, and the notion that the urban machine should thrive at the expense of a few bumpkins currently occupying what had become very desirable land was hardly offensive when viewed through the modernist lens of a society in the process of ecstatic urban growth. However, many (not least the displaced residents themselves), were troubled by the thought of the loss of these communities and sought to preserve the people and places that would be sacrificed for the sake of the big city to the east.



Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich would sink below the rising waters of the reservoir. As Boston was reshaping its own landscape, replacing water with landfill to support a growing population, the residents of the Swift River Valley would feel the dark irony of progress as a river they’d known all their lives was transformed into the 38.6 square miles of water that would spread over and erase their land and history.



 



It is a false comfort to say that these towns now lie at the bottom of the reservoir. They are not anywhere. The land that once held them has been reshaped and changed by the waters that swallowed it, the residents are dead or displaced, and the buildings have been destroyed or relocated. Nowhere in the world, for example, is there an Enfield, MA. So in the late 1930s, for the people whose lives had been so closely tied to those towns, the notion that they would disappear without a trace was unacceptable, and a few decided to do something about it.



The Swift River Valley Historical Society occupies an unassuming set of buildings in New Salem, a neighboring town only partly flooded in the creation of the reservoir. In the years since the creation of the reservoir, it has grown from a small collection of photos and trappings to a massive and comprehensive archive chronicling the valley’s history and abrupt disappearance. It now comprises three buildings, the Whitaker-Clary House, containing most of the collection, the Prescott Church Museum (hauled over from Prescott before the flooding) and the Carriage House, which contains an engine of the Dana Fire Department, various pieces of farm equipment, and an assortment of hand tools in addition to countless other odds and ends. It is managed by a devoted assembly of unpaid volunteers, several of whom are among the last surviving residents of the towns.



That the society was founded in 1936 is a testament to the fact that the residents’ desire to assemble and preserve their local history was (unsurprisingly) spurred on by the impending demise of the four towns, by the threat that the very ideas of those communities might be drowned along with their physical settings and disappear forever. The urgency with which the act of preservation had to be approached sets the mission of the Swift River Valley Historical Society apart from other historical societies:  if you were confronted with the imminent destruction of everything you knew, what parts would you take away so that the whole could be remembered?



This was one in a series of burning questions facing the society’s founders. What mode of preservation would be the most effective? And what things were already preserved? Despite the absolute elimination of the towns and the land that they occupied, some reminders of the communities nonetheless remained: not only did most of the displaced residents continue to live in the region for the rest of their lives, leading lives not terribly different from those they might have lived had they been allowed to stay, but you can even follow several roads, including Main Street of New Salem, directly into the waters of the reservoir if you go far enough. Whatever means the society would use to preserve those towns would have to focus on what could not be recaptured, and so the curators looked to the region’s recent past.



The versions of Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana that are preserved by the society remain (perhaps for the obvious reasons) frozen in a very specific time. The artifacts collected speak to the character of the towns as they were in the early twentieth-century, complete with heirlooms from previous generations and a subsequent awareness of the towns’ recent past, but the communities depicted by the hats, photographs, and furniture of the SRVHS are plainly ones that know nothing of space shuttles or rock and roll, or barely even of World War II. Here it always is the nineteen-thirties, and always will be.



It is clear, however, from every detail down to the Depression-era one-room schoolhouse replica, that this was intentional, that the SRVHS indeed aimed to capture these towns as they were just before the time of their flooding. The story that it tells is more than just a history of these towns themselves—it is also about the tragic series of events that made them so significant. These communities are being preserved not only because of the simple fact that they aren’t here anymore but so that visitors might get a more complete idea of what it felt like when they were taken away. The society is preserving not only physical objects, which stand in for the towns themselves, but also an emotional reaction to the flooding.



What other way is there to preserve the feeling of a tragedy than by capturing the affected community up to and including that moment in time? The Swift River Valley municipalities had a history that decisively ended beneath the waters of the Quabbin, meaning that the SRVHS had its work cut out for it in its efforts to reconstruct that history.



What defines the identity of a city or a town? It is certainly more than landscape: Rome without seven hills would still be Rome (and indeed the hills are nearly invisible today), just as Boston remained Boston even as it quadrupled its size, expanding horizontally out into its watery environs and sacrificing its own hills to create the fill with which to do so. The built environment and the artifacts it yields are certainly better reflectors of the human influence on a place, but only to an extent: how much can a total stranger be expected to glean about Greenwich from a set of cooking utensils? Could New York be captured by a coat-rack, or even a subway map?



The idea that place can be satisfactorily defined by a discrete set of spaces and tangible objects is problematic, and its limitations are noted by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities:



 



I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves; but I already know that this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn.



 



It is not the artifacts themselves but their inherent connections to the people of those lost places that make them so attractive to those who are trying to reconstruct the idea of a society. Since so many of the people who knew this land are now gone, the only way in which their lives can be recaptured is through the things that they used and touched. The artifact is a stand-in for the person who cannot be there, and it is up to the visitor to fill in the imaginary space between the concrete object and its relationship to a different time, place, and set of people. A historical museum, then, takes a leap of faith in assuming that its patrons will know to seek out that connection.



Museums like the SRVHS are predicated on this assumption, that the spirit of a community can be kept alive through its paraphernalia. But the idea expressed above by Calvino is not lost on them: as SRVHS president Elizabeth Peirce points out in her introduction to “The Lost Towns of the Quabbin Valley,” the Arcadia Press book authored by the society, artifacts and photographs cannot reconstruct, only approximate:



 



What was sacrificed? Gone are the sawmills, gristmills, and cloth mills. Gone are the factories where boxes, brooms, bricks and buttons, nails, pails, piano legs, carriage wheels, and hats were made. Gone are the mining of soapstone and the making of charcoal. Gone are the orchards with 50 varieties of apples, the berry fields, and the market gardens. Gone are the doctors, dentists, lawyers, statesmen, artists, poets, writers, musicians, photographers, inventors, educators, and yes, patriots. Gone are the good times of the Grange, the neighborhood clubs, singing schools, debating societies, husking bees, quilting parties, and taffy pulls.



 



By and large, these are things that could not have been preserved in any literal sense. A few buildings were moved out of the valley (in addition to those now occupied by the society, there is at least one notable example of a home that was transported to Dorset, VT and reconstructed there), but due to the low income of many valley residents, most homes and public buildings were simply razed to make room for the water. Beyond that, it is impossible to imagine how these things that Peirce lists among the most important elements of the lost towns could possibly be kept for future generations. How do you keep alive the idea of an apple orchard if the actual land it occupied now lies beneath a massive body of water? How can you archive the idiosyncratic community that would have resulted from this specific set of “doctors, dentists, lawyers, [and] statesmen,” all interacting with each other in a way that can never be totally reconstructed? The Swift River Valley featured a unique community of people, the essence of which could not survive such a transplanting unaltered.



The collection of the SRVHS represents simply what the valley’s displaced residents ultimately decided would be the best way to preserve and honor a collective idea both of the places that they lost beneath the water and the group of people that had inhabited those places. The idea that a place can be reconstructed by pulling together as many of its tangible, material artifacts as possible is an interesting one—certainly a former resident of Dana or Enfield will experience a surge of memories upon viewing a photograph of a particular house or examining a doll that might have belonged to a childhood friend. But as the number of valley refugees shrinks further and further with the years, the question of whom these towns are being preserved for becomes an increasingly important consideration.



The uninformed visitor to the museum is presented (ignoring, for the moment, the details that deal directly with the flooding) with a set of trappings that could spell out any part of rural New England in the early twentieth century. The melodeons, the farm equipment, the children’s clothing—these are items that could just as easily have appeared in the collections of countless other small-town historical societies.



How are these artifacts different from those of any other town in that period? The simple answer is that they are not. While there are certainly exceptions, a number of the items contained in the vast annals of the SRVHS could have come from any town in a similar time and region. Speaking generally, the only difference between most of the pieces in this collection and those in others like it is that here, the baseball uniforms and fire engines say “Dana” or “Greenwich” on them.



The exceptions to this rule, the things that remind the visitor of the unique fate of these towns, pose different problems. Copies of the letters from the state informing residents of the situation; a program from Enfield’s Farewell Ball; a relief map showing the stages of the reservoir’s construction. While these artifacts are certainly remarkable for their poignancy, they play into the unfortunate fact that for most outsiders (and as the original residents age and pass away, nearly everyone is one), the most notable thing about these places is that simply they are not there anymore.



The land on which Dana, Enfield, Prescott, Greenwich, and small parts of other communities were established now lies quietly at the bottom of the reservoir, and the number of people who can remember that land when it belonged to four small towns is diminishing rapidly. And though the younger generations may learn, even deeply appreciate the story of those towns, it is unavoidably a different sort of understanding that they experience. No combination of artifacts will awaken nostalgia for life in 1920s-era Dana or Prescott for someone who never got the chance to experience that firsthand—all it can do is dispassionately suggest what these places were like in their last moments. A lot of the artifacts are commonplace things that but for their context would never be associated with such a specific location and story, unremarkable but for their invisible history. Nothing ties them to these places but the society’s determination to preserve the mythology of the four towns by presenting their history as a series of objects.



Peirce wisely and sadly notes that the society’s mission is a necessary but bittersweet one. It is, she says, “a story about times that once were and can never be again [that] is remembered and told over and over at the Swift River Valley Historical Society, where that story is frozen in time.” Frozen to be sure, but necessarily so. The Quabbin towns never got the chance to exist beyond the 1930s, and any story or memory associated with them unavoidably stops there.



On April 27, the eve of disincorporation, the residents gathered in the Enfield town hall for a “Farewell Ball,” featuring a live band, a dance floor, and, assuredly, an overwhelming sense of imminent loss. At midnight, the musicians struck up an emotional rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” before the attendees sadly shuffled out and the hall was locked up for good (one resident observed, “It is no longer a town hall in a town that is no longer”). The following day, they would walk away from the places that many of them truly felt they belonged to but would never even be able to visit again.



Only the youngest of those people in attendance that night are still alive today, and they, along with the very few other onetime residents of the valley, have the distinction of being the only ones who can remember the four towns that were lost to the reservoir, the only ones who can ever possibly understand what those places were truly like. When they are gone, Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich will cease even to be memories, existing only in the clothing, photographs, hand tools, and fire engines contained in the rooms of the Swift River Valley Historical Society. 



 



“Prescott is my home, though



rough and poor she be



The home of many a noble soul



the birthplace of the free



I love her rock-bound woods and hills



they are good enough for me



I love her brooklets and her rills



but couldn’t, wouldn’t, and



shouldn’t love a man-made sea.”



 



Charles Abbott (Prescott resident), 1921



 



 

I



     After my Grandfather died, he waited in line for one year. His ashes, inside a lacquered box, sat among the ashes of others in a cold concrete bunker nestled in the Chinese countryside. Each box bore a tiny black-and-white engraving of the deceased. The owner of the bunker kept track of burials by scrawling a name and date on the lids.

     A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. It was rigged to save electricity by shutting off when it sensed no movement. Whenever someone came in on funeral business, the bulb flickered on. Otherwise, the dead waited their turn in darkness.



PROPERTY RIGHTS



     There are seven million people living in Hong Kong, making it the fourth most densely populated city in the world. Its citizens are dying faster than ever, at numbers that have doubled since 1970. Forty thousand people now die each year from the standard gamut of reasons: drowning, old age, suicide, electrocution, severe allergies, traffic accidents, heartache, stress.

     A century ago, these 40,000 souls would have found eternal peace at the foot of some sacred, pine-forested mountain chosen for optimal feng shui. Such postmortem peace is now impossible, as most of this once-sacred land has been developed into condominiums or factories.

     The line between the yang world of the living and the yin world of spirits is vaguely drawn in Chinese theology (an amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs). This line blurs more each year as millions of Chinese flock to live over the old bones of their ancestors, creating a literal juxtaposition of life and death.

     Property rights, for example, work for the dead in much the same way as for the living. In China, property exists in a state of perpetual leasehold. Whether a high rise or a hovel, residential property may be owned only for a period of 70 years. At the end of this period, the property is either re-leased or the hapless owners evicted.

     The dead, too, face the possibility of eviction. China’s most esteemed burying ground, Babaoshan (“??? Eight Treasure Mountain”) cemetery in Beijing, is not so much a holy mountain as a quiet gap in urban sprawl. Regardless, the upper echelon of Chinese society engages in bidding wars over its plots, which start at 70,000 yuan, or about 11,500 dollars for a 20-year lease. If a family’s fortune has turned by the end of those years, the formerly exalted government official or wealthy businessman is expelled from his resting place like a loaf of expired bread.



II



     Once Grandfather’s year in exile ended, our entire extended family packed into four Toyota cars and prepared to inter him in his (semi-)permanent resting place.

     It was raining that day. For a long while we drove into pine-covered hills, until an empty city emerged from between the trees. Tall black columns rose from stone steps which went up and up until they brushed the grey horizon. Blurry, colorless portraits stared at our small party from every direction.

     Cousin Jiang held up an umbrella to keep Grandfather dry. We climbed stone steps until we reached a small slab nestled between two columns. On it was Grandfather’s face, etched in ink. Elder Uncle Hu raised the slab with a tire jack, revealing an opening underneath.

     “Well—here it is,” Uncle said, hesitation in his voice.



SAFETY NETS



     Since Neolithic times, the Chinese have been obsessed with remembrance after death. To be forgotten by descendants is equivalent to hell. One’s ghost would enter the next world as a low-ranking personage, looked down upon by other spirits. To guard against this fate, the ancient Chinese buried their dead with plentiful provisions, including a large supply of the deceased’s favorite food and alcohol. In certain eras in ancient China, wealthy individuals would be buried with mementos, servants, or even wives.

     Today, wine is still poured into the grave-earth. Oranges, meat buns, and other delicacies are left on graves to fill the air with pungent smells of decomposition. Wax fruit, plastic jade bracelets, and paper Rolex watches are common offerings. A cigarette might be lit and left burning on the grave. Lung cancer is one of China’s leading causes of death.

     Despite strict rules governing food and alcohol provisions, religious requirements have long been lax. A wealthy family might have employed both a Taoist and a Buddhist priest to officiate the funeral, or invited an expert in the Confucian classics to preach filial piety as the dead were ushered away.

     Unlike their modern counterparts, the ancients enjoyed a short waiting period between death and spiritual peace. According to tradition, spirits remain on earth for seven days, after which they enter heaven, or hell, or are reincarnated. These seven days are fraught with danger for the family of the deceased. Traditions, some common, others unique to individual families, must be meticulously obeyed. Any small misstep—the presence of a mirror, the color red, the misuse of a title—might cause the spirit to transform into a vindictive ghost.



III



     “Turn around,” commanded Aunt Pearl.

     “What?”

     “Turn around. You can’t watch,” she repeated as she gripped my shoulders and steered me to another gravestone (marked “?? Zhang Xin”) a few feet away.

     “Why can’t I watch?” I protested, plucking at her lean fingers. “He’s my grandfather.”

     “Of course. And he was born in the year of the pig,” she said. For Aunt Pearl, no more explanation was needed. According to Chinese superstition, dogs and pigs have “?? mao dun,” instinctual conflict, and if I were to witness the interment, he would come back as a ghost and bring me bad luck.

     I glanced at my father, who stood near grandfather’s grave. He shook his head as if to say, Let it be.

     Sighing, I obeyed Aunt Pearl’s demand and spun around. She clicked her tongue with satisfaction and returned to tearing apart sheets of fake dollar bills. Each bill bore in clumsy English letters the logo “Hell Bank Notes” and the confident claim “guaranteed legal tender for spirits.” Later we would burn them on Grandfather’s grave to send him pocket money for trinkets and snacks in the other world.

     Uncle Hu grunted as he cleared debris from the grave. I scanned the other gravestones, which bore black-and-white portraits of mostly expressionless faces. I could tell the age of each person when he or she died. Most faces were old and lined. Every so often a young face peered out from the frame, with eyes black and cold.

     Aunt Pearl finished tearing the Hell Bank Notes. The pine trees rustled impatiently. Sounds slowed and faded, while the grey faces around me grew accusing and hostile. I felt a great desire to turn from them, to turn around, to look, to make sure my family was still behind me, to make sure they had not vanished into the other world and left me alone.

     A loud crack broke the quiet. I spun around in time to see the edge of a red lacquered box vanish under the stone slab, into darkness.

     We kowtowed in succession, three knocks each. When my turn came I could think only about the wet dark hole in which we had buried Grandfather. I kneeled dumbly on the cold pine-strewn ground until Aunt Pearl tugged at my arm.

     We set off firecrackers to frighten away evil spirits. They fizzled into the air and burst dully against the rain. Bangs echoed intrusively from column to column and suffocated among the pines.

     We squeezed into our four Toyotas before the echoes died. Uncle Hu drove the first car, his fingers pale against the steering wheel. We sped away and away from that empty stone city, none of us turning to look back.



HISTORIES



     Cremation was not always the norm in China. Although Buddhists regularly burned the bodies of their dead, other religious and ethnic groups considered cremation taboo. Tibetans, for example, believed only criminals should be burned. An auspicious Tibetan burial, known as Sky Burial, involved placing the body on a high mountain peak to be picked apart by vultures and the natural elements.

     In modern China, however, cremation has been law since 1956 when 151 communist party officials, including Chairman Mao Zedong, signed a Funeral Reformation proposal. Given the nearly half-billion Chinese deaths that occurred from the 1940s to 1960s, there was a simple logic to incineration.

     According to the China Funeral Association, modern China has a death count of over eight million people each year. Four million of these bodies are cremated, which brings the cremation rate to 52.7 percent. The Association would prefer 100 percent.

     At the Yishan Crematory, the workers are mostly middle-aged and balding. Ashes work their way under their fingernails, leaving the hands of handlers permanently black. The pollution that hangs as perpetual smog over China’s cities does not hold a candle to Yishan, a factory for processing the dead.

     Yishan is in Shanghai, a city of 14 million with a death rate of 100,000 people per year. Most of those 100,000 pass through the crematorium. Four hundred bodies a day are ferried by motorized lift to 24 incinerators. The incinerators belch toxic smoke into the air and into nearby neighborhoods, perpetuating some cosmic joke about the cycle of death.

     It is a most innovative facility. In previous years, blood drained from bodies was disposed through the sewer system. But the sheer volume of displaced blood eventually grew to become a health hazard. Yishan developed an embalming method that uses freezing instead of bloodletting to preserve bodies until they are ready for cremation.

     Many Yishan workers are kept busy digging graves or carving gravestones, but they never seem to keep up with demand. Some would-be customers resort to do-it-yourself mounds on the sides of railway tracks or on the hillsides of scenic preserves.

     Wealthy families have the option of circumventing the Yishan process altogether. Some send bodies abroad to be buried in the United States or Canada, taking advantage of various body shipping services that promise to deliver goods intact and in acceptable condition.

     With so many bodies going through the crematorium, mistakes do happen. Instead of servants or wives, some families burn a fire-resistant memento with the body. The object serves the dual purpose of comforting the soul of the dead and verifying the ashes’ former identity.

     According to the workers at Yishan, the funeral business is a business of life. They do whatever they can to smooth the post-death process for their customers.



IV



     In China, four (“? si”) is considered an unlucky number because it is phonetically similar to the word for “die.” The combination of four and eight (“?? si ba”) is even unluckier because it sounds like a curse - “?? die now.” Buildings often skip over the fourth floor and jump directly from three to five.

     Even in cemeteries, where the dead already reign, one rarely sees a fourth burial terrace or a tombstone numbered four.



FINAL DECISIONS



     The combination of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought in China complicates end-of-life decisions.

     Taoism urges harmony with the Tao (“? the Way”). Death is a part of life, the flow of the universe. In dying, one returns to the primordial void.

     Buddhism urges freedom from suffering. To accept death is to accept the futility of suffering and to ease the suffering of caretakers. Life is transient and impermanent, and a single death has no effect on the scheme of the cosmos. Besides, there is always the chance one may be reborn as a being higher than human.

     Confucianism urges communal harmony, especially within a family. Followers of Confucian thought think constantly of their ancestors, their children, and their relations, however distantly related. If one person’s sickness creates discord and suffering for the family, it might be better to end the problem at the source. And if one’s relations make proper preparations, death and the journey that follows will pass like a dream.

     Despite the diversity of Chinese beliefs, the overarching message they impress on the Chinese psyche seems to be: Let go.



V



 



     “I can’t go,” declared Grandmother.

     “Mother,” said Aunt Pearl with impatience, “Not this again.”

     “I won’t go,” Grandmother repeated.

     “You must go,” said Aunt Pearl, “We buried the old father last May, and now we must go pay our respects. It’s the one-year burial anniversary. You’re his wife.”

     “I don’t care. I’m not going to that damned place.”

     “Dear mother, for heaven’s sakes, why not?”

     “Because you saw how he died,” hissed Grandmother, “Feeble, in his bed, with his bedpans. Such indignity. Smoking a cigarette until his last moments. Selfish. He was the type of man who kept his best thoughts for himself. When Hu was sent off to labor in the boonies, did he raise a finger? No! I was the one who walked miles for my son—your husband. But when Little Sister went to Beijing for college, who took a vacation in the big city to visit every year? Him, of course. The old fogey was selfish and self-absorbed. I was the one who kept this family together. How dare he leave me so suddenly, in that way, with such—such indignity. I will not go visit him. He should be the one to come visit me. He should be the one—he should be the one—”

     “Don’t say that,” exclaimed Aunt Pearl, aghast, “How would you feel if he really came back to haunt you? You’d have a heart attack, and we’d be burying you next!”

     “Oh, I would have some choice words for him,” said Grandmother.

     “Oh—dear!” Aunt Pearl quickly made a bow to Grandfather’s home shrine in the corner of the kitchen. The grey face in his portrait remained impassive. Uncle Hu, standing silent by the door, looked at his watch.

     With an air of finality, Grandmother sat down on a kitchen chair and repeated, “I’m not budging. I’m too old. I waited so many years, in bad weather, for him. He can stand to wait a few more years for me.”

     Aunt Pearl wavered between Grandmother and Uncle Hu like an indecisive bee. Finally she exclaimed, “Ai-ya! Have it your way, then. Don’t blame me if he comes back and haunts you for being a faithless wife,” and then, with genuine anxiety, “Mother, if you still insist on your blasphemy, make sure you hang a frond of palm and a clove of garlic over the door. You can buy palm fronds for cheap at the fourth street market. Oh, and the garlic must be extra pungent. That is the only way to ward away ghosts.”

     Aunt Pearl shepherded the entire family out the door. On the street waited four gleaming Toyotas, the same ones we used last year. As I climbed into a back seat, I looked back over my shoulder into Grandmother’s kitchen window.

     Grandmother stood in the middle of the room for a moment, arms folded, watching us go. Then, as the door of the last Toyota clicked shut, her entire body relaxed. Perhaps it was a trick of the tinted windows, but the lines of grief she had accumulated in the past few months seemed to melt from her face. Her lips formed a slow, secret smile.

     She sat down cross-legged, in the fashion of a small girl, in front of Grandfather’s shrine. With tenderness, she picked up his black-and-white portrait and placed upon it a single kiss.

EXCERPTED FROM 1868 WINTER ISSUE



 



Whenever one takes up a paper now-a-days, or goes into a public meeting, or attends a party, he is met by the words, Woman’s Rights. Most people, I fancy, have a very vague opinion as to what is meant by these words; but so much the more, perhaps, do they absorb public attention, to the exclusion of other topics, which the *mens vacua *(do not translate this by *vacant mind*, for you would be wrong) is apt to regard more pressing, if not more interesting. Reconstruction and finance hardly receive more discussion, or are more persistently forced upon us, will we, nill we. The end of a political crisis, such as we have just passed through (shall I say?) is, perhaps, a favorable time for originating and circulating all sorts of theories and excitements; and we may hope that, when things reach a more settled state, Mrs. Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Miss Anna E. Dickinson, will step aside for—what I hope I may be pardoned for calling—more attractive objects.



But, meanwhile (and this is my reason for writing this article), I do not think that they have the wrongs all on their side. Even my personal acquaintance with women teaches me so much. And how small an acquaintance with woman a student in Harvard has, who lives out of Massachusetts, and knows no one in town, only those can know who are themselves in like unhappy plight. But there are some women that even we have to meet; and by these women, I do not hesitate to say, our rights, as men and humans, are shamelessly and constantly invaded.



First, there is the Goody. Coming to your room soon after breakfast, the following scene invariably takes place. You sit down to take a last hasty and necessary look at your early recitation. Enter the Goody; who proceeds to inveigh, perhaps, at your practice of taking a daily morning bath. If you suggest considerations of cleanliness and hygiene, she retorts, conclusively, of course, —women always do,— that your water, after you have emerged from your bath, is yet tolerably clear and free from dirt. Meaning, apparently, that there is no occasion to bathe until you are – excuse the word—filthy. Which opinion, even backed as it is by her example, you have some objections to adopting. Again, if it is near Christmas, she torments you with plaintive allusions, and delicate hints, and sprightly anecdotes, apropos of nothing, as to how J.B., or P.Q., or X.Z., once presented her with a turkey, or a barrel of flour, or some money, or some other confounded remembrance, that affords her text for innumerable and endless sermons. If you gently remonstrate with her, because she doesn’t dust your room more than once a month, of course you have the assurance that, when she goes into the next room, she rails incoherently, for, every once in a while, she regales you with a tirade against the man overheard, who said,— and is, —and does,— and will be – Heaven knows what all. If you indulge her by answering her, or speaking to her, she finds fresh inducement to continue. If you say nothing, she still mumbles and mutters all the time she is in the room; and so, the only way, generally (for you cannot swear of course), is to grin and bear it, and dead, as well, from want of the half-hour destroyed by this woman.



Then there is one’s washwoman. When, as is frequently the case, you find, on counting your wash, that in place of the seven collars put in, only four have come out, you get no satisfaction in attempting to reason with her on her arithmetic; for she, passing over the superficial loss of three collars, goes to the root of the matter directly, and with much bitterness of language, directed at you apparently, and with that rare logical mind found in woman occasionally, proceeds to inform you that her rent has been raised, which of course settles the matter, and leaves no more to be said. If you suggest that you have no desire whatever to to appropriate Mr. S.’s shirts, a laughing allusion to the depth of the snow, or the price of provisions, again clears the matter up.



Then, as if those women whom you have to meet were not enough, you are constantly liable to encounter some dragon in the cars, on the street, at the theatre, who makes life, for the time, a burden. On one occasion, having been in town to transact some business, I took my seat quietly, and began looking around at my fellow-passengers. After a short time, my attention was aroused by an altercation going on between the conductor and the woman next me. It appeared that she had offered some ticket, or money, which the conductor refused to take. Now, it is the firm belief of these women that they know every one’s business, and no man his own. Consequently, they dispute every official act or statement with a coolness and positiveness that, to the weak mind of man, are wonderful. The woman in question said it should be good, and the conductor said it was not good, whereupon followed an every-day version of the dialogue between Lear and Kent –



*Lear*. No.



*Kent*. Yes.



*L*. No, I say.



*K*. I say, yea.



*L*. No, no; they would not.



*K*. Yes, they have.



*L*. By Jupiter, I swear, no.



*K*. By Juno, I swear, ay.



This discussion having gone on some time, the few cents were finally paid; and then, to my boundless disgust, fright, dismay, and confusion, she turned round full on me, and read me, to whom the controversy had not the remotest interest, a lecture, which was divided into three heads. I. An expression of her disregard for the money, and interest solely in the principle of the thing; II. The duties of horse-car officials in general; and, III. Of the Union R.R. Co. in particular. All of which, by directing the attention of the whole car on me, covered me with shame, and interrupted a very pleasant flirtation I was successfully conducting.



I have noticed, in general, that the loudest and longest talkers are the strongest advocates of woman suffrage, and all its “heritage of woe.” In view of this fact, I have hit on a brilliant plan, that will cut one way at least. Let us give the suffrage to all women who will for ever after, to put it plainly, hold their tongues; and I think the advantage would be cheap at the price. And our own particular lady friends need not be alarmed, for this would have no bearing on them. But things being as they are, if we hear much more of Woman’s Rights, we shall have good reason to avail ourselves of our chance to raise a counter-cry of Man’s Wrongs.



ADOLESCENS.