Old Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

vengeance. Chrysanthemum was a person who really came into her own in adversity. She was my true friend.
    “Let’s just talk about you, OK?” I said to Joseph. “Your mother said on the phone that you might need my help. I’ll be glad to help you.”
    My heart, cold as dead ashes, was slowly warming when suddenly a crazy idea struck me: Could Joseph’s project in China just maybe also help my company come back from the grave?
    “Uh, yeah. Right now I’m planning a family image data service. Modern society is an immigrant one. A person can live his whole life all over the world and most people don’t know anything about their ancestors. They don’t even know much about their own father and mother. For a lot of people it’s only when they are older that the desire hits to learn about where they came from. Take my mother, for example. All along, she’s regretted never knowing much about her own father and mother, and now that they’ve both passed on, she has only limited information to piece together their story. This regret of hers inspired me to create something. As you remember, my grandmother was from Old Town. I’d like to begin with that place, and I was hoping you could go with me down south and help me there.”
    Hearing Joseph speak of Old Town, I didn’t feel the quickened heartbeat of ten years earlier when I first saw that employment ad in the Lompoc newspaper. Old Town was not far off—a two-hour flight south from Beijing. All I had to do to return was stand up and just go there. But in my mind Old Town had been receding farther and farther into the distance. After Grandma passed away, I never went back. And in Old Town I’d see the same old predictable pattern of tall buildings and grand mansions. I’d walk back and forth there and wouldn’t be able to figure out where, exactly, I was. In Guangzhou? Shenzhen? Wenzhou? Nothing ever stays the same, of course, but the magnitude of change was beyond all imagining. Old Town was like a reformatted computer on which not a single byte of the original information had been left. Faced with such twists and turns in life, I didn’t know whether this made me sad or happy.
    Last year, I brought my daughter to school in the US and, as a favor, asked Xiaoli to drive us down to Lompoc for a visit. The small town felt and looked unchanged from before. The street I once lived on had a little roast chicken restaurant. Just as before, the Mexican lady owner was all smiles as she greeted and attended to her guests, only now her face was powdered a bit more thickly. The Chinese restaurant I used to work at was still there. Through the full-length windowpane, I saw the fat owner behind the counter, head bowed as he went over his accounts. Just about no changes, then. The trees and buildings on both sides of the street showed no sign of being worn down by time. As if entranced, I felt it had been only yesterday that I had been strolling about Lompoc.
    This was exactly the warmth and intimacy people long for when they return to their native place, the feeling that they had never really gone away. In this sense, my own native home, Old Town, had vanished, and I supposed then I’d never be going back there again.
    At that moment with Joseph in the coffee shop, Old Town had no special meaning for me. What I cared about were this job’s prospects and how we would work together. I was very happy to accept this offer since I needed a new way to make money. Given my current predicament, I had no alternative but to consider restarting my old line of work compiling sentimental and fluffy stories, or disguised versions of my own great passionate love affairs, for newspapers and magazines. I coped with my economic crisis by living off the money I earned from these submittals. In the more than ten years since leaving Lompoc and returning to Beijing, here I was again, “cooking words to feed starvation.”
    Joseph said, “If we work together well, later on I can give you all our