The Northern Tomb

This is a slim book with only three voices, but it immerses the reader in everyday life in Northern China, where past and recent history still shape it. In 2019, Mr Zao, Sister Fu, and Junior are living in Shenyang in Manchuria, an important city, once the capital of China, where successive waves of invasion and conquest have left their mark. Their lives are shaped by traditional customs, just as much as by the laws and conventions of the modern society in which they live, and each has experienced turbulent times, especially 85-year-old Mr Zao:

As I grew older my memory reached further back like the lengthening shadows at sunset. The edges were losing their sharpness, but the shapes remained intact, looming large, vivid as dreams... The other day, while struggling to fall asleep, I recalled an explosion soon after the Restoration of Light in 1945.

The explosion was caused by the bombing of the local Fengtian ammunition factory by the Russians, prior to their invasion.

In the middle of the night we were woken by violent blasts and stumbled into the courtyard. The entire sky was red, the air scorching. We ran with my mother towards the west and didn't get home until dawn.

Mr Zao has a passion for telling stories and he is a born story-teller. He also has a passion for Peking Opera, and he and Sister Fu often sing together to the photograph of his recently deceased wife. Since he considers it "an intergenerational obligation" to archive them, his memories surface vividly throughout the book. But although Sister Fu also has a passion for stories, her memories are very different and surface only incidentally as she cares for Mr Zao.

Sister Fu ("sister" is simply a polite form of address), who is a widow of 51 and "past official retirement age," has become Mr. Zao's full-time carer and companion. She comes from a very different background to him. His earliest ancestors had been Manchus of quite high status, some of whom has become caretakers of three Quing Dynasty mausoleums, including the Northern Tomb of the emperor Huang Taiji on the outskirts of Shenyang. He grew up in a large family, his mother caring for everyone; and his father, an opium smoker, had friends in administrative positions, and would take him to the theater.

Sister Fu, on the other hand, has memories of growing up in a shared mud house in the Black River country on the Russian border. There, she herded pigs, chopped wood, and cut grass, while her grandmother with bound feet chased and killed chickens in the backyard. She has nightmares about her older cousin, who had molested her until she was 11 and her family moved away. And at the age of 19, she became pregnant by another man and had to run away from home, rejected by her parents. In Shenyeng, she had fortuitously met her generous and unusual husband, a lover of books and poetry, a love which transferred to her. She met Mr Zao when she was working as a cleaner of the Senior Officer's Ward, where he was being treated for a broken shoulder. He had refused to have the required professional carer, and had been impressed by Sister Fu's careful habits and thoughtfulness, so he asked her to become his full-time carer, at twice the sum she earned at the hospital.

The arrangement suits both of them, and is agreed to by Sister Fu's adult son, Dawei, a computer engineer who still lives with her. He plans to stay on in her small flat and look after himself, although his mother suspects he will "live on takeaways, which were nowadays at everyone's fingertips." After some initial suspicions, it also suits Mr. Zao's son, who is almost the same age as Sister Fu but is referred to throughout the book as "Junior."

Junior's early life, too, was drastically affected by cultural changes. In 1983, as a rebellious teenager, he had been arrested under the Severe Strike Anti-Crime Campaign after being caught with a knife in a street fight between two groups of boys over ownership of a pigeon. After an horrific time in a detention center, he was sentenced to 12 years in the Great Northern Prison. There, conditions, although bad, seemed like "first class accommodation" compared to the detention center. The influx of prisoners during the Severe Strike were mostly misbehaving students, but there were dangerous criminals there, too. The prison was in an "isolated backwater," and some of the workforce, overworked and underpaid, joked that they themselves "had been sentenced to life imprisonment as though having committed the worst offenses."

During his time there, Junior makes friends, studies cooking, and becomes largely responsible for organizing a Spring Gala on New Year's Eve, which entails earning the respect of two of the most dangerous criminals, rehearsing prisoners, making costumes from any bits-and-bobs they can find, and lastly planning the logistics of seating everyone, including the group of government accredited overseers who choose to attend. When he is released from prison, he keeps in touch with a circle of friends, which includes ex prison guards. This network helps him to source scarce medicine when his father eventually catches Covid 19, and to arrange special care for him in the new Chinese Medicine Hospital.

Sister Fu is impressed:

What a room it was! I'd never been in a hotel room but imagined it couldn't be much better than this one, clean and comfortable, furnished with two beds, a television and shelving painted dark green, though with no windows.

Sadly, the hospital system begins to seem draconian, and although Mr Zao keeps insisting he is better and must go home, Junior and doctors disagree.

All these memories are just part of the ordinary lives of Mr Zao, Sister Fu, and Junior, who especially is besotted with his infant twins and has become their caring and much-loved father.

Sister Fu spends time with two "Widow Sisters" she met in the Northern Tomb Park when secretly distributing her husband's ashes under his favorite trees. They practice Tai Chi Sword together, and she learns massage from "Older Sister," whose in-laws had been "martial artists." She remembers the blind masseuses she met when, in her 40s, she suffered from neurosis and was sent to a sanatorium:

I went swimming every morning, learnt qigong and meditation, and ate seafood in abundance. The rest of the time I frequented the massage room and made friends with the blind masseuses. They worked in pairs, one massaging, the other knitting, taking turns.

Mr Zao tells of his younger third sister who contracted tuberculosis:

I was surprised when my father, who'd received such an enlightened education, would approve of inviting a shaman to perform a spiritual dance at our home... The shaman was in her thirties, rather striking with prominent features and a dark complexion, a thick plait hanging off her shoulder... she inquired about my sister's sickness, much like a visiting relative. Then she went onto the courtyard, lit a bunch of incense sticks and burnt a roll of paper incantations and spells in a trough.

The shaman goes into a trance, utters nonsensical words and dances, and the ashes of the burnt papers are drunk by his sister, but she does not survive.

Mr Zao's two daughters, who live overseas, keep in touch with him regularly by phone. And at Chinese New Year, the youngest organizes a family WeChat meeting on The Festival of the Kitchen God. Sister Fu pastes colored, cut-out red snowflakes to the windows for luck, then spends New Year's Day back at the own flat with her son, opening urns of 40-day-old eggs and pickled cabbage for a feast:

I wiped the dust off the wraps over the urns sitting under the kitchen sill and removed the tying ropes. The grey plastic sheets gave out cracks as they were removed and their creases were opened, like old joints first getting out of bed. The duck eggs inside the ceramic urn were ready, after marinating in brine seasoned with pepper, cinnamon, cumin and ginger. It was a shortcut, but I had no idea where to find yellow mud or plant ashes in the city's concrete forest.

At other times, she and Mr Zao sing Chinese Opera together, and he persuades her to collaborate with him on composing antithetical couplets:

She laughed, shaking her head vigorously as if to loosen her neck. "No, no, no. I'm not the literary type'. But her eyes opened wide shining.

It's just a matter of exposure. As they say: reciting three hundred Tang poems will make you a poet. Let's give it a try, shall we?

Antithetical couplets, I have learned are complex creations in which a line of poetry is taken and for each character in the line one of opposite meaning is chosen, but the new line must maintain the rhythm and meter of the first line while providing an appropriate opposite meaning. Creating them is a popular Chinese pastime.

Isabelle Li weaves many aspects of Chinese life, with its long-standing beliefs, superstitions and traditional celebrations, into The Northern Tomb, while bringing each character to life as part of their own family, with all the joys and worries this normally entails. Their various responses and worries about the outbreak of SARS/Covid 19 and the restrictions that affect them, are familiar, but individualistic, and their memories are shared as part of long and eventful lives.

As Mr Zao says, "My life had been mostly ordinary and uneventful like many other lives," yet he had lived through and been involved in wars, conquests, occupation, havoc, civil war, the Great Famine, the Manchurian Plague, and the Cultural Revolution. Maybe that is "ordinary" for elderly people in China, and the recent Covid 19 restrictions might seem trivial by comparison. Mr Zao, happily involved in present day life, certainly seems to think so.