Forbidden City, page 35
“Are you going home?” I asked.
He nodded.
Maybe he could take my family a message. A train wheezed into the station and unloaded passengers carrying heavy sacks, their faces smudged from travel. The air turned pungent with sweat and tobacco. Many were beginning the journey that Fatty Song wanted to put to an end, and they averted their eyes from his misfortune.
“Can you tell my parents you’ve seen me?” I asked. “That I’m okay?”
He stared at his callused hands. “Your mother died,” he said.
Ma. My first word, my first plea, my first longing.
From a relapse of the fever that had killed his sister, he explained. His beloved younger sister, for whom he’d long ago asked if I could bring back a sweet. “Your Ba collapsed and died in the fields not long after.”
My father’s cough had been carving away at him before I’d left home. Did it end his life? I remembered the way he stretched, his arms wide enough to embrace the sky. His hoarse laughter. His silences, sometimes days long. Before I knew of the Chairman, of revolutionary heroes, I’d only had one god: my father. He inhabited every myth, every legend: no giant as towering, no demon as ferocious. The first god I’d prayed to, yearning for the approval that I would never have again.
As if from a great distance, I heard Fatty Song say that my sister left with a traveling tailor. Gone. Everyone, gone. The noise of the train station dulled, like I’d been underwater for too long, and I needed air.
“Which sister?” I asked at last. “Which one lived? And which one died?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d already left by then.” Someone from our village, who’d later followed him to the steel mill, had told him the news.
He wrapped his arms around me until I stopped shaking. Despite my numbness over the months, I was still capable of grief. Still capable of loving my parents and my sisters. I’d harbored the hope that I might go back and see them someday. I’d tell them about you, the son they’d always wanted.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Traveling.” We’d both lost our sisters. Both far from home, we should look after each other.
He searched the station over my shoulder, his expression sharpened with cunning. He might remember that the Party official had selected me over the other girls. I once had value. With his sister’s death, maybe he’d given up thinking that he could protect anyone but himself. Who knew what he might do, in exchange for a train ticket, a warm bed, and endless meals?
I stood up. My clothes were torn, but I wasn’t hunched on the ground, not like him. I told him I’d come back with more food for him. Instead, with the last of my cash, I bought a ticket for the next train leaving the station, to flee the place where I learned my family had been destroyed.
I spent a sleepless night on the train, overwhelmed by memories of my family’s final days together: Ma, braiding my hair. Ba, bringing me water as I studied beneath the acacia tree. My sisters, nestled against me in bed. I don’t remember the conductor, the passengers beside me, the announcements, or the landscape we passed through, only the jolt as the train arrived. Outside the station, I blinked in the sunlight, my body brittle with grief.
I didn’t know where to go next, only that I had to stay away from the graves of my parents and my sister. If I never knew for certain which sister died, one could live a day and die the next, the other reborn.
* * *
—
The Chairman hadn’t punished my family for my crimes, the only solace I could find in this loss. Within days, I found other reasons to blame myself. I should have been in the village, I never should have left, and I could have nursed my parents and my sister and kept them alive. I was unable to bear the sight of families, of fathers and daughters, of husbands and wives, of sisters, of their shared features, expressions, and gestures reflected and repeated. Of squabbles and slaps echoing from courtyards and apartment windows.
Sometimes, the guilt made me reckless: when I lingered at a muddy cliff’s edge, when I held the blade of a sharp scythe loosely, when I ventured too close to the wheels of a wooden cart. When I waded into the deepest part of a swollen river, carrying my rucksack above my head. When my foot slipped, I pitched forward, welcoming what was to come: cold blackness, and the end.
Each time, I pulled myself back. With no reason to return home, with every reason to leave, I quickened my way to the border. The country’s far southern reaches in Guangdong province were known as a land of bandits and barbarians, whose people had traveled overseas to work for more than a century. The Chairman, who’d missed his chance to study abroad, had called those who left unpatriotic, traitors for abandoning the motherland. Many rebellions originated here, but if people were rising up against the Chairman, I didn’t find them. In the Pearl River Delta, the lush red earth was laced with streams, and dandelion clouds were reflected in the rice paddies. Like most everywhere I’d traveled, the locals eased my passage, feeding and sheltering me in exchange for my help with the chores.
The borders were sealed, but I learned that the determined could cross over to Hong Kong. I could try to slip past the guards and their dogs to cross the land that connected the Kowloon Peninsula to the mainland. West of Hong Kong, another route began on rocky cliffs that would take me through Shenzhen Bay. East of Hong Kong, the route through Mirs Bay was longer, and sharks were said to roam the waters.
For a month, I practiced swimming in a tributary of the Pearl River, hours a day until I became supple and strong as a beaver’s tail. The Chairman used to cradle me in the pool so that I could practice my strokes and kicks. I’d been weightless in his arms. Now I’d swim farther than he’d ever dared.
The villagers must have known I wanted to escape. They didn’t warn me or try to stop me, but they didn’t have to: The drowned, those who didn’t succeed in their quest to flee, washed up onshore, and authorities displayed their bloated, flyblown bodies and their putrid reek as a warning. I swore not to fail.
* * *
—
Clutching a patched tire, I arrived at sunset. The sinuous terraced lines on the rolling hills resembled the stripes of a tiger poised to leap. Pollen drifted through the air. The golden canopy of a cassia tree, glowing in the last rays of light, seemed a beacon. It was the spring of 1969, nearly three years after I’d left the Lake Palaces. Though the checkpoint, with its barbed wire fence, was on the other side of the peninsula, patrols were known to roam here, too. I waded into the channels of water that snaked through the mangroves, grasses brushing against my pants and mud sucking at my bare feet. A branch cracked and I ducked, listening and waiting. An animal, maybe. Farther into the marsh, where the air smelled of moldering, of rotten eggs, I discovered heaps of clothes, a pair of boots, tinned food, a crumpled map, a book, and other treasures the escapees pitched when they decided what was most important: this possession or their life.
I wondered if I was ready, if I should turn back. If I delayed any longer, I might lose my nerve. Blood pounding in my ears, loud as drums, I plunged into the waves. Across the bay lay Hong Kong. The ground fell away, the salt water burning my nose and mouth. With the tire, I could rest when I needed to, and wouldn’t have to swim the whole way.
I kicked and kicked until a wave slapped me in the face and I coughed and flailed, grasping at the surface, clutching at nothing. The tire slipped out of my hands. I treaded water, craning my head, but didn’t see it. I’d gone too far to turn back, though. The breaststroke would sustain me longest, slow and steady through the waves.
Sometime later, I stopped again, trying to fight off the panic seeping in. I couldn’t judge my direction, if I was coming or going, sinking or swimming. Was the jolt against my foot a shark nosing its way to the surface, or the tire floating back up?
The Chairman’s early lessons returned to me. Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. Breathe. Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. Breathe. Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. Breathe. A sequence elemental as a heartbeat. As I swam toward fires burning on the far shore, I dreamed, not asleep but not quite awake, either.
I am paddling up the murky river of my ancestors. Everyone swims along with me. Ba! Ma! Your daughter has returned! And my son, my son, my son, now a toddler. We clasp hands and drift in the current flowing upstream. Silver bubbles streak behind us like comets. You let go, wanting to play in the eddies and shallows. Ahead, I recognize the grandmother I have never met, and her mother, and her mother. “Mei Xiang,” they call to me. Grandfather, too, and his father, and his father: a line of lives converging. Far below, boulders are the remains of ancient cities and a flash of light is sunshine glancing off a pagoda. Fires burn and palaces appear and disappear, armies clash and race apart, and dynasties tick backward.
The Chairman waits for me. For all of us. Light streams around him, from his eyes, his fingertips, and his mouth. With cupped hands, I push back to move forward. My legs kick in time to my heartbeat, to the beginning, to a fountainhead high in the mountains, clear and pure.
CHAPTER 30
I washed up on muddy flats in Hong Kong, where empty oyster shells drifted like snow.
Walking down the beach, I turned for a final look at my homeland, fuzzy green on the horizon, under skies hazy as weak tea. I squinted, and it seemed to recede. I said farewell to you and my family, to Teacher Fan and Secretary Sun. Farewell to the Chairman, and the revolutionary hero I had almost been.
At a brick church with a huge banyan tree in the courtyard, I found refuge. I received English lessons, an education, and meals in return for speaking and acting with conviction—a job I performed effortlessly, for I’d been practicing all my life. I sang the songs of miracles, of loaves and fishes, and of the dead risen.
I saved souls, lowering my eyes and softening my voice, touching my hand lightly to the wrists of strangers, whatever I could do to hold their attention. Not once did I believe. I recognized too much of the Chairman in their god, recognized my old self in the followers, praying for glory and salvation.
When the Americans put a man on the moon that summer, the world gazed up at the silvery crescent. Did the astronaut discover the moon goddess, or did she hide? Did she consider hitching a ride back to earth? Hong Kong no longer seemed far enough away from the Chairman and it was then I began thinking about more distant shores.
My escape would take a few years. To win a missionary post in America, I had to convince the pastor I could open the hearts of Chinese immigrants. But just as I’d abandoned the revolution, the slogans and stories of heroes, I would abandon the Los Angeles church that sponsored me. I took a bus to San Francisco and found work at the Jade Dragon.
This afternoon, I’ve been wandering the streets of Chinatown, remembering. I stroke my mother’s dowry bead in my pocket. The Chairman tried to obliterate our past, but the Chinese still revere our dead. Against his wishes, in secret, we prayed to our ancestors and asked for their blessings and protections.
I elbow past a market where produce packs the bins and turtles and frogs flop in plastic buckets, the water bubbling from a hose. The smell of scallions, earth, blood, and guts tinges the air. Disco music pumps from an apartment above the shops, and a low-slung, lime green sedan cruises the street, young men hanging out the windows.
At Portsmouth Square, the teenagers do not mourn the Chairman, gossiping instead about parties, their friends and foes. Those with a choice of idols couldn’t imagine a movie star, a president, the Pope, all in one. These children would find him and his revolution backward—self-interest, not self-sacrifice, will better their lot and their families’. Their indifference would be the worst punishment of all for the Chairman.
Secretary Sun had survived his association with me—or maybe not.
After the defeat of the President, the Chairman designated the Defense Minister as his future successor. He’d proven his loyalty by creating the Little Red Book. Soon, the Chairman must have come to view him as a threat. Eventually, the Defense Minister, his wife, and son took off in a plane with half-empty fuel tanks, which crashed in Mongolia. In the newspaper, Secretary Sun was listed among those who perished, those accused of trying to assassinate the Chairman. After seeing how our country bled by its own hand, maybe he’d been desperate enough to slip secrets to the Defense Minister. How inescapable the Chairman would have seemed, as the engine sputtered and their plane spiraled out of control. How fortunate I’d been to escape the Chairman, achieving what the most powerful men in the country couldn’t. If I believed in divine intervention, my survival might have seemed like the work of gods.
But I owed no one. In exchange for my freedom, I’d given up my family and my country, and lost you, a cost heavier than all the rest. Alone I survived and alone I remain.
Others made their mark on history. Not long ago at the Wong Brothers Bookstore, I came across a photo of Midnight Chang. Before her death, a young man working at the French embassy had snapped a shot of her at a rally. Her hair flowed like a banner and her expression seemed fierce as the god of war, in an image copied around the world in the days when the country remained a mystery. A face fit to lead a revolution. Although Midnight Chang had achieved what I once longed for, I had survived.
I don’t know what happened to Busy Shan or to Teacher Fan. Neither of them would have liked San Francisco, a city they would have considered too small, too slow, the people muddleheaded fools who smile too easily.
After I fled, the Chairman would have had other lovers. Dozens, I suspected, for each conquest helped him deny his decline. But still, the disease would have crept through him, inexorable, incremental as the tide. As the Chairman’s body failed him, his lovers would have become his nurses, his flesh meting out punishment to a man who believed himself without law and without heaven.
With his death, people here can now reach family trapped on the other side, the sons and daughters and parents they left behind in China, and return to the homeland they thought closed forever, kneel and press their foreheads to the soil.
In the newspaper box, I spot him on the front page—his fleshy cheeks, the large mole on his chin, his beneficent smile—under the headline: “Leader of Red China, Dead at 82.” I suck in a sharp breath. The news that felt distant and unreal suddenly cuts me in half: before, after. The Chairman would have believed that he would face down this enemy, like all else deemed impossible to conquer. As a teenager, the most I could do was run from him, but the journey that began in my village, ascended onto Tiananmen, crossed China and an ocean, ends here.
The street steepens by the Jade Dragon, one of the neighborhood’s best, where we serve meat every night, every meal, not only once a year, where the doors open to anyone who can pay, and the menu is wide enough to include a humble bowl of rice porridge and an extravagant bird’s nest soup. The restaurant shares the block with a church, an herbalist, and a bakery, the air reeking of powdery herbs, incense, and pastries flaky with lard. Through the church’s iron gate, a mossy angel watches. I stroke its grimy face, soot smeared like a mustache above its plump mouth, more beautiful in its imperfection, for the comfort it offers the grieving. For those who go on living.
The clank and whir of the Jade Dragon’s kitchen echo in the alley. The cook is steady and kind, and his moves behind the stove fluid as a dancer’s. Tonight, after clearing the dishes and flicking off the lights in the dining room, he and I will eat a midnight meal of spicy tofu and ground pork in the kitchen. It has become our nightly ritual, when the restaurant is quiet, the kitchen warm, and no one else seems awake in the neighborhood. The brightness I felt, in the best of times with the Chairman—to burn like that again is impossible. But I deserve a longer-lasting flame.
Maybe I will share my story with this honorable man. If I tell him about you, who knows what might follow?
I pass a playground where boys chase one another and girls pump their legs on the swings. They’re about the age you would have turned this year, when a child’s roundness sharpens and lengthens. My yearning for you returns; my yearning has never gone away. I never had a chance to discover who you were and who you would have become.
Before I met you, I viewed children as defeat, life closing in, repeating the fate of my grandmother, my mother, all the women who came before me. I didn’t want to give birth to a son. I wanted to be the son, free of a baby strapped to my back, free to run. After I lost you, for a long time I promised myself that I’d never get pregnant again.
So much of my life in San Francisco has felt marked off, but my savings, rolled into tube socks and stuffed beneath my mattress, have been a safeguard against unknown calamities, and could provide for a future whose shape I’m beginning to see.
I duck into a store to buy a string of firecrackers. Not to celebrate the Chairman’s death, but to honor your life. The Chairman drew his last breath today, minutes after midnight of the Moon Festival. It’s also my birthday. When the Chairman was my age, he was still a library clerk dreaming of revolution. His glorious future was yet to come. Once I wished to be memorialized in a proverb, in a story handed down through generations, but now I just want a long life, as long as the Chairman’s. Longer.
I strike a match. One, two, three, four sputter and die out in the breeze. Cupping my hand, I light what remains of the pack and toss it onto the firecrackers in the gutter. When they fail to catch, I turn to leave. Then the hissing starts. Bucking, twisting, and crack bam boom. I walk back toward the smoke and heat and light, my arms spread, ready to accept this gift.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Years ago, a teasing glimpse of black-and-white documentary footage intrigued me: Chairman Mao surrounded by giggling young women in tight sweaters. As I would learn, the peasant turned revolutionary was a fan of ballroom dancing—and young women, who partnered with him on the dance floor and in the bedroom.
