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death. Aimee telephoned me. When I arrived at the mansion gate, the Communist soldiers were milling uncertainly about the front courtyard, aware that something had happened inside the house. A servant told me Aimee was at the well in the garden, and I set out, by way of a small door in the courtyard wall, to look for her. It was a moonless night and the garden was very black. A wind was shaking the high trees and rustling through the bamboo. Thinking of the old man newly dead, I might have been uneasy had it not been for the very ordinary horses of the soldiers stamping at their tethers in the darkness all around me.
    A white stone path that began at the door ran past the well, and I had followed it for a considerable distance when I was startled to see someone in white coming toward me, carrying what looked like a raised umbrella. Then I heard the figure call, in Aimee’s voice, “David, is that you?”
    As she came closer, I could see that she really was carrying an umbrella, and a pail of water besides. Her white dress, I knew, was mourning attire. “The dead must be washed with water drawn at night,” she said when I asked what she was doing. “The water must not be touched by the light of the sky, even the night sky. It is a custom.”
    We walked back to the door of the main courtyard together, past the bamboo and the trees and the horses. I wanted to say something comforting, but Aimee looked capable and in control of herself, and I could think of nothing that seemed right. When we had gone through the door, I heard weeping and chanting. Aimee stopped, and then suddenly began crying, “Ai ya! Ai yo!” and went toward the main hall. I followed, feeling bewildered and wondering if, as Fourth Brother, I should cry out, too.
    The whole family and about twenty Buddhist monks were gathered in the hall. Aimee folded her umbrella and surrendered her bucket to one of her aunts, who carried it away. The relatives, including a number of people I had never seen before, were dressed in unhemmed gowns of unbleached muslin and were moaning and wailing. The monks were chanting the Feast of the Dead, and were making a good deal of noise with gongs, wooden blocks, and bells. Aimee brought me a white sash and tied it around my waist under my suit coat, and told me to sit down. The only people making no outcry or other noise were the servants. I saw one of them going out of the hall with the rusty ice-cream freezer in his arms. The sock-knitting machine was already gone. Other servants were cleaning, laying carpets, or polishing furniture. The wall mirrors, of which there were many, had been covered with sheets of white paper.
    Actually, the old man’s death had come as no shock to the family. It had been expected, and they knew that Mr. Yu would never have been able to approve of “New China,” and that in a short time the inviolability of his own courtyard would have been shattered. They felt he was better out of it — honored in death rather than humiliated in life. And partly because, in their relief, they also felt guilty, and partly because they were uncertain of their own future, they had decided that the old man’s funeral was to be a sort of symbol of the past as he had known it — a last flaring of gold-and-red pomp before they should all be submerged in the drab puritanism of the revolution.
    After I had sat with the mourners for some time, Aimee took me outside into the cool night air. She explained that what I had been witnessing was the first-night wake, and that it would go on until morning. As a member of the family, I had honored her father by being present, but as a foreigner, I was not expected to stay the whole time. She told me that the ceremonies of the funeral would last for forty days, but that the most elaborate rites would take place on the third day. Then she walked with me through the still, empty courtyard. The family was waiting, she said, for the