Forbidden City, page 15
Leaning against the Chairman, I nibbled on dried persimmons from a wooden bowl. The fruit softened and expanded in my mouth, salty and achingly sweet. Hunger dug at me, different than the hollowness of my childhood—this appetite was born from plenty, after I had grown used to full bowls at every meal. We snacked idly to occupy our mouths, and the more I ate, the hungrier I felt.
We spent most of our waking hours by ourselves, or in the company of his bodyguards, who often asked for his advice on love while we played mahjong. Sometimes the chief of security would drop by to discuss arrangements related to National Day, or the scholarly doctor to discuss naval battles and other bits of history, but the Chairman had far fewer meetings than I would have guessed. Aside from the dance parties, he never met with his fellow old revolutionaries. I didn’t know if that was typical, or only during my training. After living what must have felt like ten lifetimes together during the war, it seemed they’d had enough of one another.
Instead, they traded stacks of letters and reports in boxes delivered twice a day, or else an occasional phone call from the Defense Minister or Premier or another high official. How little we’d understood in the village, how a distant stroke of the pen by men in the capital determined our fate.
These top officials must have once been like bandit blood brothers to the Chairman, swearing oaths while hiding in bamboo groves, but running a country seemed mostly bureaucratic. I was disappointed, just a little, that the Chairman didn’t have to burn the paperwork after reading it to keep it from falling into the wrong hands and that it wasn’t written in code.
At the time, I was oblivious to the Chairman’s loneliness. How could any of us, the Chairman included, admit that a man so beloved lived in such isolation?
* * *
—
Later, after we climbed into bed, he read aloud from Jin Ping Mei, a book that held every coupling possible between a merchant and his six wives, his maids, and various singsong girls: a woman kneeling to offer the flower of her bottom; the lovers used rings and balls between their legs, and dabs of a powder that enabled the merchant to have sex with ten women in a night; and another woman groaned as he tossed iced plums rhythmically between her thighs. Her legs spread, her ankles tied to a trellis with foot-binding ribbons.
Then he fed her the plum, the Chairman said.
“Was one plum enough? I don’t think she would have her fill,” I asked.
He grinned. “None of them ever had their fill. Officials drank, they gambled, they had their pick of girls—so lazy, so decadent! Peasants had to sell their children to survive. They had to choose: die in poverty, or rebel.”
I crept my fingers on his thigh. When he reached for me, I pushed aside books and got onto my hands and knees, crouched beside him on the bed. He’d posed me once before in this position. It had taken him a long time that night, and I hadn’t known where to look or if I should close my eyes. Toward the end, I’d been rising, expanding, and I grasped at that sensation again.
He got onto his knees. As we rocked, my left arm buckled and I lurched forward, off of him. He groaned. Something cracked—His back? His knee? When I tried to turn around, he pushed back into me. I learned then that the delay intensified everything for him and for me. I refused to remain a body that he pushed around, pushed apart, and soon might replace. Throughout, I kept him waiting.
As we sprawled on the knotted sheets, I supposed that the force of his will could also keep me from becoming pregnant. The force of mine, too. Ma had struggled to conceive and keep children in her, and if I was the same, the curse would protect me.
“What’s the name of the author again?” I asked.
He smirked. “I doubt it will come up with the President.” He reached for the book, which had fallen to the floor. “Did I ever tell you about what happened to one of its readers?”
Seeking revenge for his father’s death, the author of Jin Ping Mei had dissolved tiny grains of poison into ink, copied his book while wearing gloves, and given it to his enemy, who licked a finger to turn the pages quickly, never quickly enough. Before reaching the end, he’d collapsed and died with an erection that didn’t disappear, forcing the family to hide it under layers of silk funeral gowns. “They buried a tent pole!” the Chairman said.
“Send it to the President,” I said.
“His gingerroot is too gnarled to raise its head!” He laughed.
I wondered if the Chairman wanted me to lure the President to bed, to pry out his secrets or to blackmail him. No—he would have told me. Or maybe he still could, but first the training would determine if he could trust me. I pushed the thought away.
“Not that he wouldn’t try,” the Chairman added. “He claims he’s such a family man, but he’s been married five times.”
Though the Chairman had been married at least three times, I didn’t remind him.
“Each wife more of an intellectual than the last,” he said. “As if that might erase the stink of where he came from.”
Pulling on a robe, he went to his record player, weaving around the piles of paper strewn on the floor. He could have built a bonfire that lasted for days with the correspondence around his bedchamber. More than once, I’d seen him dig through papers on his desk, irritated if he couldn’t find what he was looking for. If I could help him keep track, I’d become indispensable.
Where to begin? I drew a sheet around myself and got up. On his desk, I found a letter from the Defense Minister, who complained about a military official who “sang a different libretto!” A libretto? I didn’t recognize the word, but if there was singing, it might have something to do with music. What an odd insult, yet one that he could have thought compelled the Chairman. While the Chairman searched through his albums, his back turned to me, I read on.
The Defense Minister must agree with the Chairman that corruption within the Party had to be rooted out, and it seemed he had enemies of his own that he wanted to purge. In time, I would notice that—unlike the letters from other top cadre—the President’s correspondence never hinted at dark plots against the Party. What he didn’t say expressed even more than what he did. I could only guess, but maybe the President wanted to preserve the order that kept him in power.
When scratchy, languorous music drifted from the record player, I startled, worried the Chairman had caught me snooping. He was studying an album cover and didn’t seem to notice me. Maybe he would have considered the correspondence a part of my education, or else he doubted how much I understood. And he’d be right. Most of the letters and reports ran up against the limits of the characters I could read.
As the song began to play, the Chairman held out his arms, the sleeves of his robe casting huge bat-like shadows. “Come.”
I dropped the sheet, found my robe, and made my way through the mess to which I’d become accustomed; it made the grand room cozier. Without the piles of books, we would have been like pebbles rattling around in a basket. He drew me close, and we danced alone and barefoot in his bedchambers for the first time.
I stifled a yawn. In his insomnia, the Chairman seemed to achieve a kind of immortality, awake for twice as long as everyone else. In a day, he lived a week. In a week, a year. I’d come to understand the intimacy shared by two people awake while others slept. In the village, I awoke at sunrise, and slept at sunset. I never knew the night until the Lake Palaces, when my life reversed. In these tranquil hours, the Moon Cake Ladies had plotted revolution. In these hidden hours, Chang’e, the immortal on the moon, ruled.
I looked up at him. “Do you ever think we might need new stories about model revolutionaries? Stories that people won’t forget, that they can’t stop talking about?”
He tightened his hands on my waist. “Go on.”
“Who doesn’t want to hear about the powerful getting humbled?” I asked. I had loved Sister Yu and Iron Girl, but their stories—first announced in the cities, then trickling into the countryside months, sometimes years, later—were out of date by the time they reached the village, I said. “What if I traveled around the country, talking about how I tricked the President?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it excite young people? Promote your calls for revolution?”
I wouldn’t admit to my other fantasies: How my shining portrait could get reprinted in posters and hung in classrooms and homes. How the people might think of me before they fell asleep and when they awoke. My father would carve my name into the ancestral tablets, among the men’s, and future generations would sing my legend.
“Think of all my training,” I said. “I want to keep serving the Party.”
“You’re an eager one!” The Chairman smiled. “Get past the President first. Then we’ll see.”
After the song ended and another one began with brassy horns, I asked him about the origins of this music. “Paris,” he said. “When I was a student, I had a chance to study there.” To learn how to build factories all over China. “I turned it down. Couldn’t pay for the ticket.” The disappointment still caught like a burr in his throat.
I nestled my head into his chest, his sparse white hairs tickling my ear.
“My mother was dying. If I’d left, I never would have seen her again.” He nuzzled the top of my head, and I imagined him my age, his features unformed, not yet swollen and imposing. Playful one day, serious the next, dreamy or pragmatic, his character not yet set. I likely wouldn’t have drawn his attention. He might not have attracted mine.
The record kept skipping and he guided us to the player, where he flicked something off the disc. He spun me beneath his arm, and we resumed swaying. I traced my finger on the nubby mole on his chin until he swatted my hand away.
The span of my life was so short, compared to the Chairman’s. Four of me could have lived and died in his many years. I wished I had known him then—in the decades before he became the Chairman, in the decades that made him the Chairman.
He studied my face. “You’re always asking questions about the old times. Maybe Yan’an is just the place for you!”
I faltered. “I haven’t learned everything I can here.”
He smiled, mischievous or malicious or maybe both. “You could live here ten lifetimes and still wouldn’t.”
“Would you go there now?” I asked, trying to change the subject. “To Paris or Yan’an?”
“The river never turns back,” he said. A moment later, he broke apart from me. Back at his desk, he wrote quickly, tapping his pen in a staccato on the pages. Sleepy, I tucked myself back into bed, wondering if our conversation had inspired him. Turning onto my side, I chided myself for daring to think I could matter like that.
The horns lulled me. I dozed, my thoughts flickering in and out. The dance parties commemorated the life that the Chairman didn’t take. A part of him still might long to hear live songs rather than his jazz records. If he had left for Paris, he might still be there, strolling with a lover. If he had left for Paris, capitalists might rule over our people, building mansions out of our bones and drinking our blood. Perhaps I might have died, enslaved and starved, or I might never have existed. I owed my life to him. We all did.
* * *
—
We had so little time together. In person, I might hold back from telling you about my quiet moments with the Chairman, but the distance between us makes me bold. I’ll reveal anything, everything that would have helped you inch closer to the mystery of who I am, that might explain who I was when we met, and why I had to leave you. Every question you might have asked, I suppose, must answer that final question most of all.
CHAPTER 12
When Busy Shan approached me at the dance party, my stomach twisted. Not because I’d been thinking of her, but because I hadn’t. The Chairman had crowded out everything, everyone else in the two weeks that had gone by, and seeing her reminded me I couldn’t ignore what was happening elsewhere at the Lake Palaces.
That night, each girl wore her hair in two braids, just like me. Even Midnight Chang. It felt as if I’d gone walking in the twilight and stumbled upon a village populated with my doubles. Did the Chairman feel the same way, when he first appeared on buttons and pins and posters, discovering himself endlessly replicated?
“Happy birthday,” she said. “Almost.”
White lights above her, strung on the rafters, glowed like hovering fireflies. Sometimes, just before my birthday, they descended upon the village. They didn’t live for long, flaring before disappearing. It was early September, and the harvest moon was waxing. In three days it would be full, and I’d turn sixteen.
“You remembered.” Over her shoulder, I noticed Midnight Chang beelining toward the Chairman. “What’s she up to?” I asked.
Hurt and anger flashed across her face.
“Did she do something to you?” I asked.
She glared at me, probably because I hadn’t bothered to ask how she was doing, because of everything I had now that she didn’t.
Guilt twinged in my chest. “Midnight Chang’s like a dog after a bone,” I said. Couldn’t we go back to making fun of our common enemy?
Her expression soured, a cherry puckered in vinegar.
She wasn’t going to play along. “You’re his favorite now,” she said. “But it will pass. It always does.”
Not this time, I wanted to say. I’m not like you, not like the rest.
“If it weren’t for me, you would have gone running home after the first day.” Turning on her heel, she disappeared into the crowd. I imagined the rumors she’d spread in the troupe: I had schemed against them all.
I searched for Midnight Chang and discovered another cadre had intercepted her before she’d reached the Chairman. But she’d already danced with the Chairman, and eventually—soon?—he’d bed her.
The air was thick with the scent of sweat and mildew. Across the pavilion, a girl started talking to Secretary Sun. She fiddled with one of her braids, twirling it. Teacher Fan had instructed us to draw out the ones who didn’t often dance. “Those who stick to the walls need a turn, too,” she’d said. He never danced, though, and he flagged down another official who led her away. Then he fetched cups of tea and joined me.
I pointed at the girl he’d rejected. “You couldn’t give her one dance?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light, still shaken by my encounter with Busy Shan.
He shook his head.
“You’d be quicker on the dance floor than the Defense Minister,” I said.
No one in the troupe much liked the man, with his limp, damp hands. I remembered how his sweat had flicked into my open mouth the night of my first dance. Slight and bespectacled, he was now holding forth in the corner with a group of cadre.
“He’s known as the Chairman’s pupil,” Secretary Sun said.
Jealousy cut through me, a bright knife. They’d been forged in the same fire decades ago, on the Long March and in Yan’an, and I would never know him as well as his old comrades did.
“He created the Little Red Book,” he said.
In the troupe, we’d studied the book of the Chairman’s writings every day. It was a book so important we’d attacked Dolly Yu when she ripped one of its pages. A book, none of us yet realized, that millions of Red Guard would wave in the air at rallies next year as proof of their devotion. I’d never thought about who’d been behind it; it was like discovering a man who’d manufactured rain clouds to end a drought. “He must be loyal. The most loyal one of all,” I said.
“So loyal, he wants everyone to know,” he said.
I looked at him in surprise.
“What does he think of the President?” I asked. “Is he trying to replace him?” I remembered the piles of mail from the Defense Minister on the Chairman’s desk. “He sends several letters a week.”
“You’ll find no correspondent more faithful,” Secretary Sun said.
At the center of the pavilion, the Premier danced with Busy Shan. He ran the government, Secretary Sun had explained. “The Premier plans the budget. Makes sure all the parts work together and keeps the lights on.”
I’d shrugged off the details; I only had to understand the Chairman trusted him. The girls had all agreed that the Premier had the lightest touch among the cadre. You wanted to partner with him at the end of the night, when your steps were at their sloppiest, because he kept you upright. He seemed attuned in ways that the other top cadre didn’t, anticipating where you might go, what you might want, and what suited your abilities, turning every step effortless. “Where did he learn how to dance like that?” I asked.
In his youth, the Premier had studied in Japan and France. “He even taught Teacher Fan at Yan’an,” Secretary Sun said.
But he couldn’t help Busy Shan that night. As we watched, she arched back, jerking him forward. She wasn’t usually clumsy, and knew the steps better than I did, but our talk must have thrown her off. They halted, and she rushed away, with Teacher Fan in grim pursuit.
Nearby, the girl who’d asked Secretary Sun to dance struggled, too. When the cadre stomped on her foot, she grimaced.
I squeezed my hands around the teacup, watching the dregs vibrate from the music.
“Aren’t you more graceful than him?”
“Not necessarily,” he said.
“Can’t you give her one dance?” I said.
“It’s not for me,” he said. “I don’t dance.”
“It’s not for you? This song makes me feel like I could do anything.” I flung open my arms, the drums pulsing through me. A few drops spilled from the cup. I set it down on the table. “Like I could dance all night. Like I could set off on the Long March. You don’t feel a thing?”
