Silent in the corner of the courtyard house, I studied her. Her face resembled autumn leaves just before the first snow… crinkly, wrinkled, tattered, but, of course, she was not a leaf. She had lived one hundred years. I smiled at the drooping black hairnet, waited for the flashes of silver as the sunlight occasionally illuminated her hair… sipped tea.

She had lived through warlords and feudalism, the Japanese, the Kuomintang, Mao and his Great Leap Forward… the starvation that followed it, the Cultural Revolution… and, now, she has known plenty and a fat, healthy great-great grandson who at six months has been “ba”ed. He wears the split crotch pants and heeds the call of nature at the sound of his mother’s whistling… new China… old China live side by side.

My gaze subtly dropped to her feet… to her “lilies.” Her feet had been bound… so, she had been chattel as well. They were not the three-inch prized little feet, but about 4 or 5 inches in length. I wondered if they had been smaller as a girl. She wore her black pants bound around her tiny ankles. She wore her little white socks under cheap, black slippers one can buy in any Chinese market. Had she ever made her own silken slippers to fit her misshapen feet? Had she ever worn red slippers with delicate embroidery? Had she ever admired the smallness of her own feet? Perhaps she had been proud of the feet she had taken to her wedding bed.

Somewhere I could hear the cries of a girl child, the squeezing of her foot into the arch like the bending of green willow branch, the stretched flesh, the contracting of bones, tender like those of tiny birds. I thought of sitting on a suitcase too full of clothes… except she wasn’t a suitcase either. She was nerves and human flesh.

She walked with a cane… that gait with her weight on her heels. I was amazed that she still walked. She did not walk far. Perhaps she had never walked far. We walked outside on the steps of the courtyard. I watched the goldfish swimming around in an enamel basin, a blooming amaryllis, dried corn and peppers hanging on the wall. I took pictures. Darkly, I moved on.

I visited her son, a policeman, in the hospital. It looked as if he had a heart attack. He was on oxygen and had a tube in his nose. He looked pale and uncomfortable in his Chinese hospital bed, his regulation pajamas. He looked me straight in the eye. He said, “Policemen in China are bad men. Policemen in China are like the Germans.” I said, “There are bad policeman everywhere.” What does one say to a Chinese policeman sick in a hospital bed?

What thoughts does he have since the sinewy fingers of death have touched him? What does he think as the minutes and hours pile up like old, yellowed newspapers? He always seemed like such a nice man to me. What secret life has he lived? Perhaps there were extortions and midnight interrogations in the glare of the white light. Was there fear so strong you could smell it, the weak bladder and excrement? Were there beatings, executions? Did he bill families for the executions of loved ones… 50 fen to pay for the bullet. What was there about this polieman in a hospital bed?  Was there nothing at all? Was there just my imagination?

Wondering if you get to keep the bullet if you pay for it, I descended the hospital corridor steps. My head down, I looked at the Rorschach of spittle on the steps, old cigarette butts, dust. I thought about something I had seen about two weeks ago. Some of the street vendors are being kicked off the streets… for health reasons? Who knows? As I walked to the end of the street, a car full of plainclothesmen slammed on the breaks and jumped out. They began kicking people off the street. Everyone ran in different directions. A banana seller tried to pedal away with his cart. As one of the cops grabbed the cart, he fell unceremoniously on his derriere. Having lost face, the cop was furious. They roughed up the banana seller and off he went with them.

I wonder a lot about that banana seller, a poor boy from the country, looking older than his years, dirty, perhaps simple, perhaps not… maybe honest, maybe not. Where is he now?  Does he make plastic flip-flops in a prison factory, justice of detainment quickly meted out, “ju liu”? Did he simply want to come to the city for a better life? Is he selling his bananas just around the corner now?

Drive three miles off of any modern motorway and you enter another century. The tidy fields are vast beyond measure. Now, in spring the crabapple blossoms lend a cotton candy prettiness to the ochre landscape. The fields are restful and quiet. The villages are rustic with old courtyard houses of three rooms with generations of dilapidated farm tools. Cows are tethered to the trees. Look more closely. Perhaps there is electric, but no running water, no plumbing, no heating. Children are dirty. Three miles from the road, life represents a stark division between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Perhaps the banana seller came from villages such as these… and, now, where is he? I am left to wonder about questions I will never know the answer to.

I have spent a long time in China. During that time I have been enamored of China. I still am. Yet, I know that in China, women are sometimes still sold into marriage without their consent. I know that a girl child has less value than a boy child… that there are far-reaching, sometimes horrible implications to the simple fact of gender at birth. I’ve heard about the harvesting of organs from dead prisoners without their consent. I know that China has an astounding execution rate… some for crimes other nations would not consider  so consequential.

I know these things… yet, I do not see these things. Sometimes, perhaps I see these things, but I do not know what I am looking at. It would be so easy to make a judgment… to separate “me” from “them,” but it is a mistake to think that there is a separation between the perpetrator, the victim and the observer as well.

Dostoyevsky said that “in every man a demon lies hidden.” I have sometimes wondered what I would have been like with the gun in my hand, the jackboot. Is there any assurance of humanity about what  anyone might do in those circumstances?  I would like to think that I know exactly where my personal responsibility and humanity begin and end… that I would always do the “right” thing; but, travel illustrates that all things are possible. I cannot pass judgment on anyone  without passing judgment on myself first. I can only be grateful that life has not presented me with a necessity to make those brutal choices that take place in the four corners of the world that we only see on the evening news… eat our dinners… brush our teeth… go to sleep without hunger in our bellys or nightmares about what we have seen or done. 

Perhaps it is a mistake to think we have so much control over our lives… perhaps our lives are governed far more by circumstance and the prescribed roles that have been assigned to us that we spend a lifetime trying to deny… at least, such are my thoughts as I walk down a dark, trash-blown street in China.