Forbidden City, page 29
I pictured my mother, gaunt and bent. But—my sister. My sister, my sister. “You should have told me!”
“The canteen was crowded,” he said. “I thought I should wait until I was alone with you.”
“We were alone after we boarded the train last night,” I snapped.
“I wanted to wait until after you spoke with the Chairman.”
More excuses.
“You just told me you couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I didn’t want to add to that.”
I glared at him. “You always think you know better. If it was your family, wouldn’t you want to know immediately?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did it say which sister died?” I asked.
“Song Mei Tian,” he said.
“First Daughter.” I gripped the armrests, a howl climbing up my throat. All my life, I’d trailed her shadow. My big sister, who’d rained down clever insults that silenced a neighbor boy, an uncle, a classmate, anyone who dared to laugh at our family. Quick to shove, quick to slap anyone who filched from our garden plot. She taught me to defend what was ours, what was mine, and made me fierce.
“The report said it was the middle sister.” He opened a letter that I grabbed from him.
“That’s Mei Ling!” Second Daughter, in the middle, her hands always clasping us together. I tried to read the page, but my tears turned the words hazy. Mei Tian, Mei Ling, Mei Xiang. First, Second, and Third Daughters. Three plum flowers, now two. Both my sisters were with me always, if not in my thoughts, but in how I had survived the Lake Palaces.
“It says Mei Tian,” he said quietly. Though we were in a private passenger car, I wanted to scream loud enough to wake everyone up on the length of the train.
“That’s not my middle sister. Admit it: You don’t know!” The words lacerated like shards of glass. “You think we’re all the same. This sister, that sister, this girl, that girl—you can’t tell the difference. You think people like us aren’t worthy of your full attention.”
“Your family’s proud of you,” he said, with the slightest catch in his voice.
“What do you know?” I said. He couldn’t speak for my family, any more than he could speak for me.
Secretary Sun cleared his throat. “Your father told the courier. He called you a hero.”
I looked out the window, the trees blurring green, as I roiled with regret and confusion, raw and burnt at the same time.
* * *
—
When we returned to the villa, they were waiting for us.
At the mahjong table, Midnight Chang seemed more beautiful than in my memory, her hair braided into an elegant coil. Though she too wore a Red Guard uniform, she seemed ethereal as a princess in a watercolor scroll. I was grimy and smudged all over from my travels.
“You’re just in time!” the Chairman said, beckoning us. They sat across from each other at the mahjong table. Usually off to the side, by a bookcase, it had been moved closer to his desk, at the center of his quarters.
“Maybe they’d like to take a rest? To wash up first?” Midnight Chang asked, her tone solicitous. “You must be tired.” She rubbed her thumb on a tile.
The Chairman waved off her suggestion. “They slept the whole way.” He studied Secretary Sun. “Though it looks like you could sleep another week! Your years have caught up with you at last.”
Secretary Sun forced a smile. We lingered in the doorway, the surprise plain on his face. It seemed he hadn’t known she’d come for a visit. In grief, in anger, I’d stopped talking to him on the train, but now I was glad that I wouldn’t have to face Midnight Chang alone. As long as I’d been traveling with the Chairman, I hadn’t had to think much about her. Secretary Sun had mentioned that the troupe had scattered, but said nothing about Midnight Chang remaining under the Madame’s orders from afar.
I wondered if she’d been part of a Red Guard detachment that visited a campus somewhere nearby. If she’d spent a night—or two?—with the Chairman while I’d been away.
On the other side of the desk, the bed was rumpled. I couldn’t tell if she’d been there, if she’d lain in sheets where I’d lain under the Chairman. At least the drapes had been pulled back from the windows. If his quarters had been shadowy as usual, I might have fled. I reluctantly took a seat—the Chairman to my right, Midnight Chang to my left, Secretary Sun across from me—everyone elbow-to-elbow around the tight square of the table.
We began. Judging from the discards piling up, I guessed she was searching for the North Wind tile to complete one of her sets of three. I had to watch not only my own tiles, but those in play. Mahjong is a game of probability, a battle, a world laid out in the tiles—all reasons the Chairman loved to play.
Though he probably could have beaten me each time, I’d also figured out how to ease his victories, discarding tiles that he needed or breaking apart my pairs and triples. Midnight Chang grabbed my discarded tile and shouted, “Peng!”
Her arm bumped mine as she reached for the last of the roasted peanuts, which had been laid out on the edge of his desk. She summoned the attendant, never shy about asking for what she believed was her due. I hid my smile. If she won the hand, the Chairman would become annoyed and cut the game short. He examined her as if she were a tile that he’d planned to relinquish before discovering it was the one he’d needed all along.
The bones were sharp in her face. How often did she starve herself, slap herself to achieve perfection?
Later on, Secretary Sun set down a tile, one that I was almost certain that Midnight Chang needed.
“Hu le!” she shouted in victory.
The Chairman pointed at me. “This one, I taught her the game, but she’s not as quick as you.”
“And you!” He turned to Secretary Sun. “You wasted no time on games while away, did you?”
“I’m out of practice,” Secretary Sun admitted.
“My luck is good today,” Midnight Chang said.
My strategy had backfired. Midnight Chang winning kept him interested, not irritated.
Shadows hollowed the Chairman’s eyes, and he had a punchiness about him that emerged after too many days of too little sleep. His tremors might return. In these moments, he was at his most impulsive. If he’d been a dog, he would have chased after anything that hurtled by.
We shuffled the ivory tiles, swirling them in hissing circles on the green felt table, their clacking like a bamboo grove in a high wind. The tiles held the colors of the universe: the red of blood, of the people; the blue of the sky, of the heavens and the seas; and the green of the earth, of the fields my family worked, of the hills behind our village.
Midnight Chang stacked tiles horizontally, lifting a long row on top of another. Within moments, she could build a wall around me. A prison cell. She leaned forward, and when I heard the sound of shuffling on the wooden floor, I realized that the Chairman had nudged his foot against hers. I heard what sounded like her nudging back, the two of them playing around. Her eyes, bright as stars. I stacked my tiles, trying to keep my hands from trembling. The tiles were cool and slick, perfect as stones washed in a river, everything that I wasn’t.
After she won a few more hands, the Chairman turned to her. “My wife said that you are an excellent player.” He drew off his cigarette, smoke curling around his head. I dropped my tile, which bounced with a muffled thump on the table.
He ashed into a teacup. “It turns out mahjong players make excellent revolutionaries. The Fudan club has been quite active, she tells me: The strategy at the table serves them well when they fight back against the cadre.”
“It’s a reminder to keep looking in unexpected places,” Secretary Sun said.
My campus report shriveled in my mouth. I had nothing so clever to tell—except for the rumor I’d spun about the President, that I was too ashamed to say out loud.
The Chairman must have mentioned my university visits to his wife, and I couldn’t shake the sense of betrayal. Was the Madame copying me, or had the Chairman pushed for Midnight Chang also to go in disguise?
His wife could have urged him on. “Why settle on one?” she might have asked. “See what they both might turn up.”
I wanted to flip the table, sending the tiles flying like teeth knocked out; I wanted Midnight Chang to tumble into the Yangtze and get carried out to sea.
She placed her tiles in a perfect line, her refinement a reminder of my fumbling. “Did you see your family yet?” she asked me.
“My duties have kept me,” I said.
The Chairman leaned forward, eager to see us fight. The wooden chair squeaked under him. I was a tile to him, but I wouldn’t be easily tossed, easily replaced.
“Duties,” she said. As if she hadn’t been selected for the same duties in the troupe, as if she hadn’t yearned to be in my place. She wouldn’t be so smug if she knew about the report that spilled the troupe’s secrets, if she realized I’d discovered that her father was a drunk. “Have you seen Teacher Fan?” I asked.
“You haven’t heard?” She paused, relishing that she knew something that I didn’t. “After she’d been relieved of her duties, she tried to kill herself.”
“Is she…what happened?” I asked.
“She jumped out the window,” Midnight Chang said. “But she lived. She didn’t have the right technique. If you’re going to kill yourself, you have to go headfirst. Make sure you’re top-heavy. But she jumped feet first.”
Their voices suddenly sounded distant, and the room turned sweltering. I leaned forward, my head hanging down, trying not to faint.
“She looked like an ice pop,” the Chairman said, his tone mocking. Her feet first, arms at her sides. He and Secretary Sun had known—for weeks or for months?—but neither had told me. From what Secretary Sun had said, I had assumed she’d taken up other responsibilities. He’d evaded my questions about her, I now realized.
It took everything in me to look up at Secretary Sun, who gripped a tile in his fist. They must have respected each other, in that way capable people recognize that quality in one another. Did he mourn her? He might have said nothing about what happened because he wanted to protect me. As for the Chairman, I guessed why he hadn’t bothered to tell me: After he’d received the news, she hadn’t crossed his mind again.
“Why did she jump?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what Teacher Fan had done wrong. Maybe someone in the troupe had reported her to the Red Guard for teaching dances that were backward and bourgeoisie. Midnight Chang could have done it, any and all of the girls eager to turn on her for the crime of not recommending them to the Chairman.
The Madame hadn’t saved her, or maybe she’d made the decision that Teacher Fan harbored too many secrets. I never should have hinted that I knew she’d rubbed mud in her hair at Yan’an. The Madame would have suspected either the Chairman or Teacher Fan had told me; maybe she’d found it easier to blame her friend.
“She could no longer tell gold from straw.” Midnight Chang stared pointedly at me. “She’d lost sight of good character, of who best served the Chairman. You didn’t see her at the university? She gets carried around in a cabbage basket and onto the stage for struggle sessions.”
She must have been crippled after she jumped. I realized then that we’d spotted her at Peking University, the woman with the bloody, matted hair, but Secretary Sun had led me away before I could discover it was her. I hated that he’d kept it from me, just like he’d withheld my sister’s fate. If I’d known it was her, I might have—I would have—what? Shouted her name, told the Red Guard to stop throwing stones? They would have shoved me down next to her.
Midnight Chang smirked. Her glee. The Chairman’s indifference—his cruelty that had been apparent all along, that I could no longer deny.
“People are saying she’s the one who brought the President that twelve-year-old,” she said.
Twelve? Tiles jumbled in the center of the mahjong table, a few on their sides, ready to be knocked over.
Midnight Chang ran her hand across her row of tiles, a paved path out of this muddy fight. “All those special hands, I can’t remember,” she said. “The Thirteen Orphans. The Great Winds. The Pearl Dragon. The Ruby Dragon. Can you teach me?”
“You’ve already beaten me,” the Chairman said.
“You can’t depend on luck,” she said.
Secretary Sun clapped two tiles together: The sound of a gunshot. A call to action, to fight back. The Chairman darted a glance at him.
I felt as though I were wading waist-deep through a swamp. “You want a lesson tomorrow morning?” I asked with as much brightness as I could force out. Midnight Chang might not know that the Chairman resisted appointments, any schedule other than the one set by his whims. If she pushed for a time, he’d skip the lesson altogether.
“Or in the afternoon?” Midnight Chang asked him. “Tomorrow night?”
The Chairman swept tiles into the case. She pushed hers toward him. If she’d known better, she wouldn’t have asked for lessons; she would have asked him to tell her the stories behind each special hand. With a nod from the Chairman signaling that he was finished with the game—and with Midnight Chang—Secretary Sun ushered her away.
She turned for a final look, not at the Chairman but at me. An acknowledgment or an appraisal, I would have expected, not the briefest sorrow I found in her expression. As she turned away, she flicked her braid over her shoulder. For the first time, I noticed she’d adorned it with a wooden bead carved into a plum flower. Stained a reddish chestnut, a shade I’d seen nowhere except my village.
I couldn’t breathe.
To her, the plum flower bead must have seemed crude, a knot of wood, but the pair I owned were my only keepsake. Who had taken it from Ma? Been where I’d yearned to return, if only for an hour, to see my sister, my parents. Pinned to my seat, I wished I’d never taunted the Madame. She would—or had already—ordered punishments for them. What she couldn’t do to me, she would do to my family. My father, paraded as a counter-revolutionary, taunted with hurled eggs and spit. Ma, whipped, her back slashed and bloody.
I bit back my question: Which sister died? I couldn’t ask about my family, not in front of the Chairman.
Midnight Chang flicked her braid again. A taunt, Know your place; a curse, as if she’d stomped upon the graves of my ancestors. She wouldn’t grant me any mercy, any more than I would grant it to her, and in truth, neither of us could stop what the Chairman and his wife had begun. Bees swarmed inside me. The buzz warped into keening, a high long note for Teacher Fan, who might have no one else to mourn her. For my sisters, whose fates I didn’t yet know.
As Secretary Sun motioned for her to keep walking, the Chairman rose, flung off his shirt, and reached for his swimming suit, drying on top of a rosewood screen on the other side of the bed. The wood was swollen, the finish faded from the constant dampness.
After they left, I turned to him. “The reports you’ve been getting…did you know the students are attacking each other?” I asked. “Red Guard against Red Guard.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said. “Any other news?”
“It’s not just with words. They’ll rip each other apart, until there’s nothing left!” I said. Bitterness rose up my throat, flooding my mouth, as I remembered Teacher Fan, tormented and crammed into a basket. My hands, palms up, splayed open in my lap, useless as I felt.
“Midnight Chang said much the same. But neither of you knows much about revolution,” he said.
Did he know if she’d visited my village? If I asked, he’d take it as proof my loyalties lay with my family, and not the revolution.
“The students are blaming the President,” I said.
He nodded.
“They’re getting revenge on their classmates, their professors, their neighbors, for things that have nothing to do with revolution,” I said. “Even though they’re calling themselves your soldiers.”
He shrugged.
“I started the rumor that the President went after one of his daughter’s friends,” I blurted, desperate to impress the Chairman.
He laughed, shouldering on his robe. “So you’re behind that dirty talk! Clever. There’s a lot of that going around—it makes for the most amusing reports. He’s so unpopular right now you could have announced he’d killed and eaten a girl, and everyone would believe it.”
It didn’t seem to trouble him that the girls in the troupe weren’t much older than the one from the rumor. I got up from the table.
He rubbed his temples. He hadn’t been sleeping well, I could tell, and soon he’d want to move on from Wuhan. With or without me? He tossed me my suit, but I didn’t catch it. Crumpled at my feet, it looked like the skin of a snake, like something outgrown. “Get dressed.”
“For the pool?” I asked.
“No, for a Politburo meeting!” he said. “Yes—the pool.”
He searched for his plastic slippers, kicking aside piles of clothes before he found them.
“I’ll get back into the routine,” I said.
“Routine,” he muttered, as if I’d hurled a curse at him. In a way, I had.
As I got dressed, I thought about how the villa’s pool was placid and predictable, where I’d watched the Chairman take endless laps in the past and where he would again today. It must remind him of tedium without end, a rut that he’d been unable to escape, no matter how often he moved from villa to villa.
I scooped up a tile that had fallen to the floor of his bedchamber and rubbed my thumb across the blue circles: the blue of the sky at the height of summer, the blue of the deepest waters. He’d had no cares, paddling around in the pond by his childhood home. Maybe we could swim somewhere else outside, or would that seem like more of the same, the banks of a pond closing in on him?
I’d been thinking about how he might fire up the Red Guard, and it came to me then. “If you want to swim, swim in the Yangzte.”
