Forbidden City, page 14
“The Chairman is occupied,” Secretary Sun told him, and led me into a courtyard with two intertwined cypress trees at its center, their trunks twisted in an embrace. I sank onto a stone bench beneath a grape trellis.
Secretary Sun remained standing. The Madame might have come through the back entrance, through the dining room that connected their bedchambers, he said. Come at the Chairman’s invitation, he didn’t need to add.
In my imagination, their heads dipped closer and closer together until they slid into the sheets that still held the outline of my body. His hand on her cheek, hers on his chest.
“She’s loyal,” Secretary Sun said. “Loyal as a dog.”
His frankness surprised me.
“He tells her to bark, she barks.”
“Does she whine at the door when he’s not there?” I asked, and then wished I’d held my tongue. I wedged my restless hands under my thighs. The Chairman had warned me to remain xiao xin, to keep my heart small. Midnight Chang, Busy Shan, any of the girls would step into my place if they could. At the Lake Palaces, I had to master the turbulence that swirled within me, that left me clumsy and off balance one minute, and sent me soaring in the next, all the extremes and in-betweens.
“He tells her to bite, she bites,” he warned.
“But—” I knotted my hands together, dusty and grimy. Nothing would get me banished from here faster than my jealousy. But I had to pry out more about her, about them.
“Why doesn’t he send her after the President?” I asked.
“She’s tried, but hasn’t yet hit her mark,” Secretary Sun said. “She complains that the President treats her like a bored wife who meddles in cultural affairs.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“She’s at her best when she’s busy,” he said. “Don’t give her cause to look your way.”
“Have you ever seen any of her movies?” I asked.
“According to the Chairman, onstage, no one was her equal. Strong as a general, but in her eyes, you could see the pain, the sacrifice. You felt it,” he said. “She didn’t cry on command, not like those actresses who wail with fat, fake tears. She understood if she cried too loudly, she took that release away from the audience. She brought herself to the brink, but let them cry.”
I wished the Chairman could have seen me perform in our play. And yet, what if I came up short and always would when compared to the Madame?
“I doubt she’s here to talk about cultural affairs, or even about the President,” he said. “Their daughter is coming to lunch tomorrow.” He explained that she’d recently graduated from Peking University, the school I’d first heard about yesterday.
The Chairman had worked as a young clerk in the library there. At lunch, in the stories he’d told me, his class resentments seemed to have grown with each patron’s snub.
He had a daughter only a few years older than me? A prickly seed ball from a sycamore tree had fallen on the bench, and I flicked it aside. “She takes after the Chairman?” I asked. Huge alert eyes, broad nose, full lips, or the Madame’s pinched nose and appraising gaze?
“Her mother.” He couldn’t hide his faint irritation. “The Chairman summons her to ask about what she’s heard from classmates, but none of what she tells him is much use. As if she might flush out spies! The Chairman said she wasn’t to receive special treatment, but it couldn’t be helped. Her professors used to give her their class notes, and the school’s president would send her back to the Lake Palaces if she so much as sneezed!”
He leaned back on his heels. His last year in college, he’d been her tutor, he said.
I wasn’t sure how old he’d been when he went off to college—Eighteen? Nineteen? Twenty? If he’d first met her during his last year of school, and she’d recently graduated, then he was somewhere in his mid-twenties, about a decade older than me. “Was she much of a student?” I asked.
“She was as much of a student as she was a spy,” he said, his tone so dry I wanted to laugh.
“Is that what you’ll say about me later?” I asked.
He glanced at me. “From what I can tell so far—no.”
I tried not to smile. “But you were such a good tutor, the Chairman wanted to meet you?”
“She was full of complaints about me. She told her parents that I was lazy. That I wanted her to come up with her own answers!”
“She was used to people telling her what to write down,” I said.
He nodded. “Her grumbling got the Chairman’s attention. Everyone else had given in. Easier for everyone to do so, except that she wasn’t learning a thing.”
A magpie squeaked and burbled on a branch high above us, its feathers flashing black and white.
“He asked me to come visit,” he said, the wonder at that invitation plain in his face, years later.
“You never left?” I asked.
“I never even went back to class,” he said. “Which his daughter didn’t mind. She found another tutor more to her liking.”
“Sounds like you didn’t mind, either,” I said. “Does she visit often?”
“If she comes by, she usually eats from the canteen, not from his kitchen. Not with him,” Secretary Sun said. “The Chairman doesn’t play favorites with his family.”
I felt stupid for not knowing, for not assuming the Chairman had a family, even though he was married to the Madame. We never discussed his children, not in my village nor in our classes with Teacher Fan. We didn’t gossip about that part of his life. The Chairman was a peasant turned revolutionary, and if the notion of family arose in our lessons, all we had to know was that he’d given his up. He was the Chairman—timeless as the sun, sprung full-born into the present, no history, no duty other than to serve the people—and not someone’s father, not someone’s brother or son.
To become a hero, your life had to be worn away, worn smooth, until you were blank, the barest of outlines. Only then could you become a light leading the people of this generation, the next, and the next. That is how people preferred their heroes—at a remove.
I chewed on my lower lip. The Madame wasn’t his only wife. Before her, the Chairman had other wives whose patriotism we’d learned about in school—Martyr Yang, who’d been executed by a warlord, and Comrade He, who joined him on the Long March. After something happened to her—I couldn’t remember if she’d been wounded or had fallen ill, or if she’d gone away for treatment. Maybe she’d died. Sometime later in Yan’an, the Chairman met the Madame.
“Is Yan’an when she started giving him advice?” I asked.
He looked up at the trellis, shadows dancing across his face in the breeze. “When she started working on revolutionary plays?” I asked. “Because she was an actress?”
“Her fame preceded her,” he said.
The officials could have deemed a movie star an improper partner for the leader of the revolution, I guessed. “The other cadre didn’t like her.”
He didn’t confirm or deny it, but something in his expression made me think I’d hit upon the truth. Though he wouldn’t know firsthand, maybe he’d heard rumors.
Why, then, would the cadre have changed their minds in Yan’an? Then I remembered the lunch tomorrow with their daughter.
“The Madame got pregnant,” I said. Maybe she didn’t know the tricks to stop a pregnancy, the ones that Busy Shan taught us. Or she let it happen, to bind the Chairman to her.
He dipped his head. He didn’t want to discuss it, but perhaps the scholar in him—the one I’d seen emerge in our lesson at the library—admired how I could piece it together.
“After that they accepted her?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he said. “She got their blessing, if she looked after him. And kept out of public life. No politics, for at least thirty years.”
Long enough, the officials might have thought, to silence her for the rest of her life, for who would pay attention to a woman who’d lost her bloom?
I kicked at the gravel, puffs of dust rising around my feet. “How many children does the Chairman have?” I asked.
Elsewhere on the grounds, the whine of a motor and a metallic ping started up. “One with the Madame,” he said. “And another daughter with Comrade He, and a son he had with Martyr Yang. That I’ve met. That I know of.”
We’d both learned about the revolution through stories, and that put us in the same generation: earnest latecomers, never as brave, never as daring, both nostalgic for what neither of us had lived through.
“How many children did the Chairman lose?” I asked.
He pressed his lips together. “It’s not so clear.”
“The history of the Chairman is our history, the people’s history,” I said, louder now. “I have two sisters. And two brothers, too—one died at birth, and another when he was a toddler.”
He reached out his arm but stopped short of touching me. “I’m sorry.”
A pill bug crept across the path. “I never knew them.” My family never talked about them, the ones we’d lost. But we didn’t have to. Their absence was in what might have been, brothers who could have eased our burdens, who could have carried on the line that would die with my father. The lost who’d shaped me as much as those who lived.
“What were their names?” he asked.
“My parents never told me,” I said. I struggled to get out the words. “To have a big brother. If just one of them had lived…”
His mouth twitched. “The Chairman had three sons with Martyr Yang,” he said. “But only one has survived. After she was killed, the children lived on the streets in Shanghai. The toddler died.”
My brothers. Why was I swiping at my eyes? My brothers were strangers.
Secretary Sun reached into his pockets, as if in search of a handkerchief, but I waved him off. “What about the other one who died?” I asked.
“He was a soldier,” he said. “Killed in an air strike in Korea.”
The Americans waged war across Asia, first Korea, and now Vietnam, drawing ever closer to China. Though Teacher Fan’s lessons about the imperialists had been hard to grasp, the Chairman’s losses made them real. I wondered if his sons looked like him, if they’d inherited his wide mouth, his temper, or his quickness.
“What about Comrade He’s?”
“Two were…left behind, during the Long March,” he said. “As soon as they were born, they were taken in by local families.”
I shivered, shot through with a chill. Comrade He would have spent her pregnancies knowing she’d have to give up her baby soon. The Chairman must have mourned his babies, too, but the pain couldn’t have been the same.
“The Party went looking for the Chairman’s children, after the war, but couldn’t find the families where they’d been placed. There may have been other children, too.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Ones I’ve heard mentioned but I’ve never asked about.”
At least my parents knew where I’d gone. By the time the Chairman married the Madame, he would have understood that no earthly bonds could hold—not between lovers, not a parent and a child.
I couldn’t imagine such a loss. Not yet.
CHAPTER 11
The Chairman stroked my hair. As his fingers traced my ear, I sank deeper into his lap. Though his swim trunks scratched against my cheek, his scent musty, I didn’t turn away from the movie playing on a screen hung against the wall.
We were studying the enemy.
A week into my training, he wanted me to see the films from the West that portrayed the perils our country might suffer if we fell back into capitalism, into greed. I couldn’t tell if I was moving any closer toward what he wanted for me or wanted of me, though. More than anything, I craved his praise, a nod, smile, or laugh, but I sensed that keeping up with my lessons, repeating after him, and serving him weren’t enough to hold his interest.
The couch squeaked under us. His shoulders jerked, and I reached up into his robe to scratch his back, his skin tight and dry after our time at the pool. He settled into my hand, and I scratched harder. A spring dug into my side. As I withdrew my hand, he told me to scratch higher. He sighed. “That’s it, there.”
It astonished me, how quickly we had settled into a routine. Mornings, while he slept, I slipped out to take dance and private voice lessons with Teacher Fan, who worked with me to smooth out my peasant accent, my peasant ways. She taught me how to make polite conversation, to laugh delicately, not openmouthed; how to hold my teacup, fingers poised like dragonflies instead of grasping it in my fist; how to leave two bites on my plate for every one I took. She’d refrained from teaching the troupe these lessons because the Chairman wanted to meet us as if we’d come straight from the village. He considered us spoiled, she said, if we put on too many airs.
By the time I returned to his quarters, the Chairman was usually reading the newspaper, the latest headline about the war in Vietnam, the increased production of tanks, or a large watermelon grown in the south, big as an ox. After lunch in mid-afternoon, we napped before swimming or walking in the gardens until I left to study with Secretary Sun, who taught me history, politics, proverbs, and other references that I might weave into my conversation with the President. He and the Chairman had drawn up a long list of books. Secretary Sun read aloud passages, which we discussed. If intellectuals worked on such assignments all day long, they were lucky, I thought. Not only because they stayed out of the sun, not only because their labor consisted of turning the pages, but because of how much further they could see.
Aside from the dance parties—held every other day or so, which went on until after midnight—I never dealt with the troupe. At the pavilion, the other girls had studied me with the bold curiosity of dogs but gave me a wide berth, as if by ignoring me the Chairman might, too. More than once, though, I’d sensed someone lurking near me and discovered Busy Shan a few meters away, the air between us grown woolly, prickly, impassable.
After the dances, the Chairman and I watched movies until dawn. At first, I’d had trouble following what was happening, too caught up in the bizarre settings: the narrow buildings tall as cliffs that poked through the clouds, cars sleek as arrows and yet big as haystacks, so numerous I could have crossed the street by walking on top of their hoods, and the foreigners, who seemed alien and ancient, their eyes so pale I thought they’d gone blind. The men clad in skinny suits and ties, and women in knee-high boots, under skirts so short they couldn’t dare bend over. It was my introduction to rock music, with its insistent beats that surged through me. At the dance parties, we never listened to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, or anything else popular at the time.
Secretary Sun attended to the roaring projector, changing the huge reels and fixing the film if it blew apart, pasting together the loose strips. Even though he remained silent in the shadows, his presence gave me somewhere—someone—else to look at. With him around, I felt freer, less shy, three turned into two against one, an equation I preferred at times to the intensity of being alone with the Chairman.
One night, the musical was the oddest yet. It was set in America, in San Francisco, though I forgot the city’s name almost as soon as Secretary Sun told me. I never dreamed that I’d walk its streets myself one day. The actors had Chinese faces, but spoke perfect English, a feat that seemed as impossible as breathing underwater. The sound of Chinese sparkled, a shower, whereas English sounded flat, a line of water dribbling across a tilted table.
“The subtitles aren’t correct,” Secretary Sun said. “He’s not an ‘old codger.’ She’s calling him a bastard.”
He’d learned English at the university, and some French and Spanish, too. It made him seem worldly, even if he’d never been to those countries.
“How do you say it?” I asked, curious if the word sounded as harsh in English as it did in Chinese.
He said the word in English and I repeated it eagerly. Bastard. The Chairman did, too.
“You only ever want to learn the curse words,” Secretary Sun said to him.
The Chairman smiled. “What else do you need to know?” He moved his fingers in slow circles on my thigh, under my skirt. My face burned. I couldn’t look at Secretary Sun, who must know what happened between me and the Chairman. I wanted the Chairman to stop, and yet I wanted him to continue, until the world fell away and only we remained.
“You can only speak one language at a time. It’s just showing off,” he said. Pointing at the screen, he let out a sharp hiss, as if spitting out watermelon seeds. “Look at how they degrade their women!” he muttered. A curvy actress shimmied half-naked before the shocked old man.
“Feudal as landlords,” I murmured. Secretly, though, I admired the bounce in her step and the sinewy ripple of muscle across her shoulders. If she’d been a ghost that lured travelers off the road, I would have gone astray, too. The soaring songs and the world lit gold filled me with yearning.
The Chairman must have sensed my fascination with the woman. “Don’t be dazzled,” he said. He ashed his cigarette, the flakes drifting in the light. “An actress streaks across the sky. Her youth, her beauty are soon gone—no matter how much she tries to hold on to them.”
Like his wife? The Chairman hadn’t mentioned what they’d discussed at lunch, or that they’d had lunch at all. He never spoke of her. Walking to and from my lessons at the Lake Palaces, I’d felt I was being watched: by her, her spies, or someone else. I glanced at the door that led to the dining room, and beyond that, to her quarters. Though I’d been tempted to peek, the Chairman never used that door; it might as well have been a wall. I had yet to hear any sounds from that direction, which I hoped meant she was too far away to hear us.
Secretary Sun had told me how she’d occupied herself over the years, combing through newspapers and magazines for what might interest the Chairman, evaluating movie projects at the Ministry of Culture, and redecorating villas. He didn’t have to explain that none of these pastimes held the political power she clearly wanted.
