Forbidden City, page 6
Tomorrow, then?
Typically, the Chairman partnered with a few girls at each dance party and favored one in his bedchambers for a week or two at a time, she said. After several months, he might take renewed interest in a girl, she added, but in time everyone left the troupe.
“We’re sent home?” I asked. The city and its wonders would vanish, and I would plunge back into the well of my village.
“Some go home, some get jobs at the Lake Palaces or in the capital. Others, no one seems to know,” she said. “You look up one day, and they’re gone.” Lowering her voice, she told me that a girl who’d argued with the Chairman—who’d flung a cup of tea at his feet!—had disappeared. “Maybe to a labor camp? Her parents, too.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “Why her parents?” I asked.
“They raised her up, didn’t they?” Busy Shan asked. “It was their fault, more than anyone else’s.”
Another girl who disappeared knew more than a hundred revolutionary tunes, she added. “No one could figure out why or where she’d gone.”
“Who decides who stays and who goes?” I asked. “Teacher Fan? Secretary Sun? The Chairman?”
“Does it really matter?” she asked. “All of them, probably.”
“Do you hear from girls who left?” I asked.
“You hear things, that’s all,” she said. No letters, I took that to mean, no reunions.
“You’re making this up,” Midnight Chang scoffed. She’d edged over to eavesdrop. “You think because we’re new, we’ll believe everything you say.”
“Think what you like,” Busy Shan said to her. She turned back to me. “You never know when your time is up. Or when he’ll come and go. Sometimes he leaves for months. In the winter, he travels south. That’s when we’re sent home. Sometimes you get summoned back to the Lake Palaces, but never more than once. Maybe twice?”
“No more?” I asked.
“No man wants to ride an old mare,” she said.
Her bluntness shocked but thrilled me, too. No one spoke like that in the village.
“What are you supposed to tell your family?” I asked Busy Shan. Motes of dust sparkled between us.
“What the Party told you,” she said.
I bit my lip. “Nothing?”
“Teacher Fan says to tell them you were in a revolutionary dance troupe,” she said.
“But…”
She smirked. “The moment you bring up political theory, they’ll stop listening.”
If I went home too soon, my neighbors would gloat and the headman would punish me, force me to tote stinking night soil or order me to work in the steepest fields of stony earth. I now realized why Ma suspected what would happen to me in the capital. It was an honor I’d been selected, but she would have understood what men value most in a teenage girl. Though I’d wanted to come and wanted to stay, a sudden rage boiled up inside me. She’d warned me the only way she could, by pressing protections onto me. But she’d still let me go.
Teacher Fan clapped her hands to signal the end of our break and put on a new record. She’d said nothing about what the Chairman had done to me. She had neither time nor patience for those who needed coddling. After she told us to get into rows, I stood in front, on the far right. She turned her back to us to demonstrate the cha-cha, but she could still watch us in the mirror. When she caught my eye in the reflection, I threw back my slumped shoulders.
She stepped forward and back, and then side to side. Simple enough, I thought, until she swiveled her hips. Up and down but round and round simultaneously—no less amazing than if she’d walked on water.
I felt stiff and solid as oak, yet also as if I might go up in flames—not only because of my lack of grace, but because her moves looked like something that should only pass between lovers. Her hips swayed as if they’d been oiled. The chasm between what she demonstrated and what my own body was capable of doing seemed impossible to cross.
To my relief, the song ended.
During a pause between songs, Teacher Fan gave us another lesson. Almost three years ago, Americans had trained their missiles onto Cuba. “On our little brother!” she said. “The Cubans stood up to the Americans, and the Americans had to back down.”
Capitalists were like hungry ghosts, never sated. Everyone had heard about a landlord who’d beaten a cousin to death, or an aunt blinded at a factory. They’d steal our very last breath for a handful of coins, and we’d no sooner let them return to China than turn a knife on ourselves.
“In every dance, you push each other on,” Teacher Fan said. “You push your partner in ways that you couldn’t if you were alone.”
Anyone could repeat slogans, but I was beginning to understand that we held the revolution in our bodies, in every twirl, shimmy, and dip, the dance steps uniting socialists around the world. I wondered if the Cubans were as sinuous and sleek as their steps. If the Germans were as lively and sturdy.
“What if your partner is so clumsy she trips you?” Midnight Chang asked. She didn’t look at me, yet I could tell she was making fun of me.
“If you get tripped up like that, then you’re not paying enough attention,” Busy Shan told her.
“Any partner of yours would end up a cripple,” Midnight Chang said. “Or maybe that’s the strategy. Let’s pair you up with the enemy!”
The girls around us laughed, and even Teacher Fan smiled. I hated my reflection, hated myself, wanted to smash the mirror and make it disappear. How much longer would I get to stay? The dance studio—along with the classroom next door—was housed in the bottom level of an administrative building that must have been constructed after Liberation. Unlike the arches and curves elsewhere in the Lake Palaces, the building was squat as a thumb, with an ugliness that announced its power to ruin an emperor’s view. The higher floors had offices, but we would never venture there, hearing more than seeing the workers who clomped in the stairwells.
After lunch, I fidgeted in the front row of the classroom, where Teacher Fan lectured on the founders of Communism. My crotch throbbed, a constant dull ache. I studied the black-and-white portraits of the very first foreigners I’d laid my eyes upon. Karl Marx, whose bushy white halo of a beard I’d learn to recognize; Joseph Stalin, with a steely gaze and a thick mustache; Vladimir Lenin, with a tiny pointed beard that made him seem pinheaded; and Friedrich Engels, his beard so huge it was as if his beard had grown its own beard. I’d never seen men so hairy, and I wondered if the fur covered their chests, their backs, and their legs.
“You’ve heard that saying, ‘To educate a daughter is like watering another man’s garden’?” Teacher Fan asked.
We nodded. A daughter would only get married, become the mother to another family’s line, become the servant to another master.
“You girls have more chances now.” She told us we’d been born into the most fortunate generation, born after the Party’s victory over the landlords and factory owners, and into the future that the Chairman promised.
Try as I might to impress Teacher Fan, though, my attentions dragged in class like everyone else’s. Nibbling on the ends of our braids, picking at our fingernails, or worrying our pimples, we peeked at the huge map of our country that hung on the wall, its thumbtacked edges curling. I tucked a foot behind the leg of my chair. A few weeks would go by before I could read a map and learn how I could see so much and so little at once, the whole of a country, the mountain reduced to a squiggle, a river into a line, and cities mere dots and our villages not there at all.
Nothing we learned in class, though, would protect us when the Cultural Revolution broke out the following year. Not even the Chairman knew that teenagers in the cities would be the first to volunteer for his campaign, the first to raise their fists against their teachers and their parents, against most anyone in authority.
And none of us knew it would begin with me.
CHAPTER 4
In the troupe, no one called me Mei; instead I went by Scholar Song, a title coined by Midnight Chang. A veiled insult, implying that I was boring and self-important—a grind, when it came to our studies—but I adopted it with pride. Even if a nickname had a teasing sting, it also set our troupe apart from the other workers at the Lake Palaces: They were our own nicknames for our own people, for the girl who only spoke in a whisper, for the one who dozed at every opportunity or sang like a lark.
The new names went along with our new lives in the capital. Our families no longer defined us; free of the names, both loving and taunting, they’d given us, we were free of the expectations that would have held us back if we’d remained home. In the villages, failures from childhood followed people until the end of their days. A greedy little boy would be forever known as Big Mouth and a smelly girl as Little Dog Fart.
As the days passed, the Chairman’s absence filled me in ways he couldn’t if he’d stood before me in the flesh. He swelled into the sky, itched in my scalp, and rode in my heartbeat. His mystery returned, and so did my devotion to him, a longing I knew that the other girls shared.
I drank my mother’s tea, praying for blood, and one morning it arrived. I’d woken up early, planning to mop the bathroom before anyone else got up. Busy Shan was wrong; I wasn’t sucking up to Teacher Fan or anyone else. I’d been feeling muddled, and a duty gave me a sense of purpose—of control.
In the bathroom, though, I doubled over with cramps and stared at the blood smeared on my underpants and at the bright streak in the squat toilet. I rested against the cracked tile wall and rubbed my fist in the small of my back, regretting yesterday’s icy shower. Blood was like water, my mother had warned me when my flow started last year. If I let myself get too cold—waded in the river or sought out the breeze just before or during—the blood would thicken and slow inside me.
When Midnight Chang entered, I jerked up my pajamas and stood, waiting for her to go away. Feeling skinned raw, I didn’t want to be around her or anyone else. She gasped and when I looked over, she was squatting, staring at her underpants. Was there also a bloodstain? When my sisters and their flows matched up, I felt left out. It bothered me now that Midnight Chang’s body had timed itself with mine—or did mine time itself with hers?—when I didn’t trust her.
“Do you need a rag?” I asked. Busy Shan had shown me where to find clean rags in the cabinet.
“A rag?” she asked in a small voice that sounded nothing like her.
If she was mocking me, I wanted none of it. “Yes, a rag,” I said. “Same as in the city, same as in the country.”
“Help,” she said in that same small voice. She stood up.
“I’m not your mom.”
Her mouth trembled. She winced, as if a cramp gripped her belly.
“Didn’t your mother tell you what to do about your flow?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
I looked over the squat toilets. “Haven’t you seen what she did in the latrines? How she took care of it?”
“She died a week after I was born,” she said tightly. In the troupe, none of us talked much about our families. The only time I’d seen softness in Midnight Chang’s face was when she mentioned her father, how this meal or that piece of clothing couldn’t compare to what he had given her. Had he ever denied her? Certain of his pride, she’d seemed certain in everything else.
Maybe she had no sisters, no aunts, and though her father might well have spoiled her, he didn’t know how to explain that her body would betray her. Maybe she’d skipped past bad skin and other teen humiliations, but she couldn’t avoid this one.
I fetched a rag from the cabinet. “Here. Fold it like this.”
She took the bundle from me. She glanced at the doorway. No one was coming yet. After pulling down her pajama bottoms again, she stared at the spots of blood on her underpants.
“Now put it in the center,” I said.
“Like this?” she asked, her movements tentative.
“A little farther back. That’s it,” I said, then explained how to attach it. “Now pull everything together.”
After she finished, she stood back up. “Something isn’t right,” she said. She tugged at her waistband. “It feels…”
“No one likes how it feels,” I said. Our voices echoed against the tile. “The first day or two, you’ll need to change it every few hours.”
She let out a long sigh. Maybe helping her would make her less spiteful toward me.
“It’s not so bad. You must have seen the other women with them?” I asked. When I tried to reassure her with a smile, she must have thought I was mocking her.
She scowled. “I don’t stare at other women like that. Like you do.”
* * *
—
The next day, our bus passed a scrawny dog balancing a ball on its nose. When the dog tossed the ball in the air and caught it in his mouth, I gasped. Busy Shan leaned against me for a closer look.
“Scholar Song, don’t you know, a dog can be trained to do anything?” Midnight Chang said from behind us. I turned to look at her.
“Roll over, sit up, bark on command,” she said. “You can even train a dog to dance.”
“Better a dog than a chicken who clucks all the way to the chopping block,” I said. Sometimes she talked nonstop, scarcely taking a breath between her words. “Who runs around without its head, glad to be free of its own clucking.”
She glowered at me. Teacher Fan, who sat behind the driver, didn’t turn around.
Outside of our training at the Lake Palaces, we weren’t allowed to leave the dormitory. Ours was among three buildings in a complex surrounded by a high concrete wall. We rarely saw our neighbors, older women who left before us and returned in the evening. Sometimes we could hear the rasp of bicycle tires and muffled conversation from the street, but otherwise my world shrank to a circumference smaller than my village: where we slept and the short bus ride to our classrooms. The route wound past warrens of homes, their tiled roofs peeping above courtyard walls.
When I first arrived at the Lake Palaces, I’d glimpsed little of the grounds, located just west of the Forbidden City, where the emperors had lived. Because the Forbidden City’s dark cobblestones glittered in the sunshine—like the heat off a wok—with scant shade or greenery, emperors and their entourages used to seek relief in the gardens of the Lake Palaces next door.
After the last emperor had abdicated, his home had been thrown open to the public as a museum, but the Lake Palaces remained closed to most everyone. It seemed out of time, out of place, perfect and eternal, the view always the same whether hundreds of years ago or hundreds of years into the future.
We were now deep in July. A flock of bicycles went by. With its wide tires and sturdy black frame, the model was known as a Flying Pigeon. Such birds never soared and would never be immortalized in a painting or a poem, but they could survive the capital’s dusty, pockmarked streets.
Three shirtless men in ragged shorts and rubber sandals maneuvered a cart piled high with chunks of metal, two pushing and the third pulling ropes—their bodies tilted so steeply they’d fall over if they let go. They didn’t look up at the poster they passed of a bearded man in a top hat and red-striped pants, clutching a knife dripping with blood. Uncle Sam, we’d learned in class, who wanted to carve up Asia.
The stench of exhaust drifted up from a hole in the floor covered with a wooden board. There weren’t many buses on the road, perhaps one trundling along every couple blocks. As we approached another giant mural, we pressed ourselves against the windows on the side closest, staring at the Chairman posed in the center beneath the slogan, long live the victory of the proletarian revolutionary line. Rendered in bold strokes, he was waving, surrounded by a group of men with a flurry of red flags at their feet. long live the chairman for ten thousand years!
Searching the faces on the wall, I recognized cadre who had danced with me. That one had stomped on my foot, and the man on the end had guided me with confidence. They held the nation’s highest positions of power, but I’d never considered them in the village, where we had sung and prayed to the Chairman alone. We didn’t know about his assistants. I would learn their names eventually, though we always referred to them by their titles: the President, the Premier, and the Defense Minister. Teacher Fan had explained that the President, who headed our country, was the Chairman’s handpicked successor. He handled daily matters, while the Chairman took a longer view, she said.
What that meant in practice, I didn’t understand. Soon I’d learn that he and the Chairman wanted the country to go in opposite directions; at the moment, though, I wondered only what order would the men stand in, lined up behind the Chairman? In the mural, they looked younger than they had at the dance party; they appeared to be the same age as my father, but that was impossible. He’d been little more than a boy in the time of Yan’an.
I didn’t recognize the man at the far right of the mural. Then Busy Shan exclaimed, “The Madame!” Not another man, but the Chairman’s wife, with a smile broad as his, her hair tucked under a red-star cap, and a billowing jacket that hid her curves. How beautiful, how fierce she might have been when she and the Chairman first met, captivating him above all others. She seemed to transfix Midnight Chang, too. I watched her clench a fist to her heart, copying the Madame’s pose on the wall.
I didn’t know much about her, but in the village school, we’d heard stories about where they’d met: at Yan’an, where the Red Army, on the run during the civil war, had taken refuge. The soldiers’ journey began in 1934 in Jiangxi, a province in the southern reaches of our country, hemmed in by mountains on three sides. First the soldiers fled west, and then doubled back through sodden, craggy trails, marching at night. Teacher Fan told us the soldiers had been half-starved, hollowed out by high fevers and bloody shits. Then they straggled up along the border with Tibet, along cliffs so steep that sure-footed horses tumbled to their deaths. That detail had haunted me: I’d pictured the riders caught up in the stirrups, the tangle of limbs and hooves; I’d heard their screams and the neighing terror of the horses.
Typically, the Chairman partnered with a few girls at each dance party and favored one in his bedchambers for a week or two at a time, she said. After several months, he might take renewed interest in a girl, she added, but in time everyone left the troupe.
“We’re sent home?” I asked. The city and its wonders would vanish, and I would plunge back into the well of my village.
“Some go home, some get jobs at the Lake Palaces or in the capital. Others, no one seems to know,” she said. “You look up one day, and they’re gone.” Lowering her voice, she told me that a girl who’d argued with the Chairman—who’d flung a cup of tea at his feet!—had disappeared. “Maybe to a labor camp? Her parents, too.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “Why her parents?” I asked.
“They raised her up, didn’t they?” Busy Shan asked. “It was their fault, more than anyone else’s.”
Another girl who disappeared knew more than a hundred revolutionary tunes, she added. “No one could figure out why or where she’d gone.”
“Who decides who stays and who goes?” I asked. “Teacher Fan? Secretary Sun? The Chairman?”
“Does it really matter?” she asked. “All of them, probably.”
“Do you hear from girls who left?” I asked.
“You hear things, that’s all,” she said. No letters, I took that to mean, no reunions.
“You’re making this up,” Midnight Chang scoffed. She’d edged over to eavesdrop. “You think because we’re new, we’ll believe everything you say.”
“Think what you like,” Busy Shan said to her. She turned back to me. “You never know when your time is up. Or when he’ll come and go. Sometimes he leaves for months. In the winter, he travels south. That’s when we’re sent home. Sometimes you get summoned back to the Lake Palaces, but never more than once. Maybe twice?”
“No more?” I asked.
“No man wants to ride an old mare,” she said.
Her bluntness shocked but thrilled me, too. No one spoke like that in the village.
“What are you supposed to tell your family?” I asked Busy Shan. Motes of dust sparkled between us.
“What the Party told you,” she said.
I bit my lip. “Nothing?”
“Teacher Fan says to tell them you were in a revolutionary dance troupe,” she said.
“But…”
She smirked. “The moment you bring up political theory, they’ll stop listening.”
If I went home too soon, my neighbors would gloat and the headman would punish me, force me to tote stinking night soil or order me to work in the steepest fields of stony earth. I now realized why Ma suspected what would happen to me in the capital. It was an honor I’d been selected, but she would have understood what men value most in a teenage girl. Though I’d wanted to come and wanted to stay, a sudden rage boiled up inside me. She’d warned me the only way she could, by pressing protections onto me. But she’d still let me go.
Teacher Fan clapped her hands to signal the end of our break and put on a new record. She’d said nothing about what the Chairman had done to me. She had neither time nor patience for those who needed coddling. After she told us to get into rows, I stood in front, on the far right. She turned her back to us to demonstrate the cha-cha, but she could still watch us in the mirror. When she caught my eye in the reflection, I threw back my slumped shoulders.
She stepped forward and back, and then side to side. Simple enough, I thought, until she swiveled her hips. Up and down but round and round simultaneously—no less amazing than if she’d walked on water.
I felt stiff and solid as oak, yet also as if I might go up in flames—not only because of my lack of grace, but because her moves looked like something that should only pass between lovers. Her hips swayed as if they’d been oiled. The chasm between what she demonstrated and what my own body was capable of doing seemed impossible to cross.
To my relief, the song ended.
During a pause between songs, Teacher Fan gave us another lesson. Almost three years ago, Americans had trained their missiles onto Cuba. “On our little brother!” she said. “The Cubans stood up to the Americans, and the Americans had to back down.”
Capitalists were like hungry ghosts, never sated. Everyone had heard about a landlord who’d beaten a cousin to death, or an aunt blinded at a factory. They’d steal our very last breath for a handful of coins, and we’d no sooner let them return to China than turn a knife on ourselves.
“In every dance, you push each other on,” Teacher Fan said. “You push your partner in ways that you couldn’t if you were alone.”
Anyone could repeat slogans, but I was beginning to understand that we held the revolution in our bodies, in every twirl, shimmy, and dip, the dance steps uniting socialists around the world. I wondered if the Cubans were as sinuous and sleek as their steps. If the Germans were as lively and sturdy.
“What if your partner is so clumsy she trips you?” Midnight Chang asked. She didn’t look at me, yet I could tell she was making fun of me.
“If you get tripped up like that, then you’re not paying enough attention,” Busy Shan told her.
“Any partner of yours would end up a cripple,” Midnight Chang said. “Or maybe that’s the strategy. Let’s pair you up with the enemy!”
The girls around us laughed, and even Teacher Fan smiled. I hated my reflection, hated myself, wanted to smash the mirror and make it disappear. How much longer would I get to stay? The dance studio—along with the classroom next door—was housed in the bottom level of an administrative building that must have been constructed after Liberation. Unlike the arches and curves elsewhere in the Lake Palaces, the building was squat as a thumb, with an ugliness that announced its power to ruin an emperor’s view. The higher floors had offices, but we would never venture there, hearing more than seeing the workers who clomped in the stairwells.
After lunch, I fidgeted in the front row of the classroom, where Teacher Fan lectured on the founders of Communism. My crotch throbbed, a constant dull ache. I studied the black-and-white portraits of the very first foreigners I’d laid my eyes upon. Karl Marx, whose bushy white halo of a beard I’d learn to recognize; Joseph Stalin, with a steely gaze and a thick mustache; Vladimir Lenin, with a tiny pointed beard that made him seem pinheaded; and Friedrich Engels, his beard so huge it was as if his beard had grown its own beard. I’d never seen men so hairy, and I wondered if the fur covered their chests, their backs, and their legs.
“You’ve heard that saying, ‘To educate a daughter is like watering another man’s garden’?” Teacher Fan asked.
We nodded. A daughter would only get married, become the mother to another family’s line, become the servant to another master.
“You girls have more chances now.” She told us we’d been born into the most fortunate generation, born after the Party’s victory over the landlords and factory owners, and into the future that the Chairman promised.
Try as I might to impress Teacher Fan, though, my attentions dragged in class like everyone else’s. Nibbling on the ends of our braids, picking at our fingernails, or worrying our pimples, we peeked at the huge map of our country that hung on the wall, its thumbtacked edges curling. I tucked a foot behind the leg of my chair. A few weeks would go by before I could read a map and learn how I could see so much and so little at once, the whole of a country, the mountain reduced to a squiggle, a river into a line, and cities mere dots and our villages not there at all.
Nothing we learned in class, though, would protect us when the Cultural Revolution broke out the following year. Not even the Chairman knew that teenagers in the cities would be the first to volunteer for his campaign, the first to raise their fists against their teachers and their parents, against most anyone in authority.
And none of us knew it would begin with me.
CHAPTER 4
In the troupe, no one called me Mei; instead I went by Scholar Song, a title coined by Midnight Chang. A veiled insult, implying that I was boring and self-important—a grind, when it came to our studies—but I adopted it with pride. Even if a nickname had a teasing sting, it also set our troupe apart from the other workers at the Lake Palaces: They were our own nicknames for our own people, for the girl who only spoke in a whisper, for the one who dozed at every opportunity or sang like a lark.
The new names went along with our new lives in the capital. Our families no longer defined us; free of the names, both loving and taunting, they’d given us, we were free of the expectations that would have held us back if we’d remained home. In the villages, failures from childhood followed people until the end of their days. A greedy little boy would be forever known as Big Mouth and a smelly girl as Little Dog Fart.
As the days passed, the Chairman’s absence filled me in ways he couldn’t if he’d stood before me in the flesh. He swelled into the sky, itched in my scalp, and rode in my heartbeat. His mystery returned, and so did my devotion to him, a longing I knew that the other girls shared.
I drank my mother’s tea, praying for blood, and one morning it arrived. I’d woken up early, planning to mop the bathroom before anyone else got up. Busy Shan was wrong; I wasn’t sucking up to Teacher Fan or anyone else. I’d been feeling muddled, and a duty gave me a sense of purpose—of control.
In the bathroom, though, I doubled over with cramps and stared at the blood smeared on my underpants and at the bright streak in the squat toilet. I rested against the cracked tile wall and rubbed my fist in the small of my back, regretting yesterday’s icy shower. Blood was like water, my mother had warned me when my flow started last year. If I let myself get too cold—waded in the river or sought out the breeze just before or during—the blood would thicken and slow inside me.
When Midnight Chang entered, I jerked up my pajamas and stood, waiting for her to go away. Feeling skinned raw, I didn’t want to be around her or anyone else. She gasped and when I looked over, she was squatting, staring at her underpants. Was there also a bloodstain? When my sisters and their flows matched up, I felt left out. It bothered me now that Midnight Chang’s body had timed itself with mine—or did mine time itself with hers?—when I didn’t trust her.
“Do you need a rag?” I asked. Busy Shan had shown me where to find clean rags in the cabinet.
“A rag?” she asked in a small voice that sounded nothing like her.
If she was mocking me, I wanted none of it. “Yes, a rag,” I said. “Same as in the city, same as in the country.”
“Help,” she said in that same small voice. She stood up.
“I’m not your mom.”
Her mouth trembled. She winced, as if a cramp gripped her belly.
“Didn’t your mother tell you what to do about your flow?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
I looked over the squat toilets. “Haven’t you seen what she did in the latrines? How she took care of it?”
“She died a week after I was born,” she said tightly. In the troupe, none of us talked much about our families. The only time I’d seen softness in Midnight Chang’s face was when she mentioned her father, how this meal or that piece of clothing couldn’t compare to what he had given her. Had he ever denied her? Certain of his pride, she’d seemed certain in everything else.
Maybe she had no sisters, no aunts, and though her father might well have spoiled her, he didn’t know how to explain that her body would betray her. Maybe she’d skipped past bad skin and other teen humiliations, but she couldn’t avoid this one.
I fetched a rag from the cabinet. “Here. Fold it like this.”
She took the bundle from me. She glanced at the doorway. No one was coming yet. After pulling down her pajama bottoms again, she stared at the spots of blood on her underpants.
“Now put it in the center,” I said.
“Like this?” she asked, her movements tentative.
“A little farther back. That’s it,” I said, then explained how to attach it. “Now pull everything together.”
After she finished, she stood back up. “Something isn’t right,” she said. She tugged at her waistband. “It feels…”
“No one likes how it feels,” I said. Our voices echoed against the tile. “The first day or two, you’ll need to change it every few hours.”
She let out a long sigh. Maybe helping her would make her less spiteful toward me.
“It’s not so bad. You must have seen the other women with them?” I asked. When I tried to reassure her with a smile, she must have thought I was mocking her.
She scowled. “I don’t stare at other women like that. Like you do.”
* * *
—
The next day, our bus passed a scrawny dog balancing a ball on its nose. When the dog tossed the ball in the air and caught it in his mouth, I gasped. Busy Shan leaned against me for a closer look.
“Scholar Song, don’t you know, a dog can be trained to do anything?” Midnight Chang said from behind us. I turned to look at her.
“Roll over, sit up, bark on command,” she said. “You can even train a dog to dance.”
“Better a dog than a chicken who clucks all the way to the chopping block,” I said. Sometimes she talked nonstop, scarcely taking a breath between her words. “Who runs around without its head, glad to be free of its own clucking.”
She glowered at me. Teacher Fan, who sat behind the driver, didn’t turn around.
Outside of our training at the Lake Palaces, we weren’t allowed to leave the dormitory. Ours was among three buildings in a complex surrounded by a high concrete wall. We rarely saw our neighbors, older women who left before us and returned in the evening. Sometimes we could hear the rasp of bicycle tires and muffled conversation from the street, but otherwise my world shrank to a circumference smaller than my village: where we slept and the short bus ride to our classrooms. The route wound past warrens of homes, their tiled roofs peeping above courtyard walls.
When I first arrived at the Lake Palaces, I’d glimpsed little of the grounds, located just west of the Forbidden City, where the emperors had lived. Because the Forbidden City’s dark cobblestones glittered in the sunshine—like the heat off a wok—with scant shade or greenery, emperors and their entourages used to seek relief in the gardens of the Lake Palaces next door.
After the last emperor had abdicated, his home had been thrown open to the public as a museum, but the Lake Palaces remained closed to most everyone. It seemed out of time, out of place, perfect and eternal, the view always the same whether hundreds of years ago or hundreds of years into the future.
We were now deep in July. A flock of bicycles went by. With its wide tires and sturdy black frame, the model was known as a Flying Pigeon. Such birds never soared and would never be immortalized in a painting or a poem, but they could survive the capital’s dusty, pockmarked streets.
Three shirtless men in ragged shorts and rubber sandals maneuvered a cart piled high with chunks of metal, two pushing and the third pulling ropes—their bodies tilted so steeply they’d fall over if they let go. They didn’t look up at the poster they passed of a bearded man in a top hat and red-striped pants, clutching a knife dripping with blood. Uncle Sam, we’d learned in class, who wanted to carve up Asia.
The stench of exhaust drifted up from a hole in the floor covered with a wooden board. There weren’t many buses on the road, perhaps one trundling along every couple blocks. As we approached another giant mural, we pressed ourselves against the windows on the side closest, staring at the Chairman posed in the center beneath the slogan, long live the victory of the proletarian revolutionary line. Rendered in bold strokes, he was waving, surrounded by a group of men with a flurry of red flags at their feet. long live the chairman for ten thousand years!
Searching the faces on the wall, I recognized cadre who had danced with me. That one had stomped on my foot, and the man on the end had guided me with confidence. They held the nation’s highest positions of power, but I’d never considered them in the village, where we had sung and prayed to the Chairman alone. We didn’t know about his assistants. I would learn their names eventually, though we always referred to them by their titles: the President, the Premier, and the Defense Minister. Teacher Fan had explained that the President, who headed our country, was the Chairman’s handpicked successor. He handled daily matters, while the Chairman took a longer view, she said.
What that meant in practice, I didn’t understand. Soon I’d learn that he and the Chairman wanted the country to go in opposite directions; at the moment, though, I wondered only what order would the men stand in, lined up behind the Chairman? In the mural, they looked younger than they had at the dance party; they appeared to be the same age as my father, but that was impossible. He’d been little more than a boy in the time of Yan’an.
I didn’t recognize the man at the far right of the mural. Then Busy Shan exclaimed, “The Madame!” Not another man, but the Chairman’s wife, with a smile broad as his, her hair tucked under a red-star cap, and a billowing jacket that hid her curves. How beautiful, how fierce she might have been when she and the Chairman first met, captivating him above all others. She seemed to transfix Midnight Chang, too. I watched her clench a fist to her heart, copying the Madame’s pose on the wall.
I didn’t know much about her, but in the village school, we’d heard stories about where they’d met: at Yan’an, where the Red Army, on the run during the civil war, had taken refuge. The soldiers’ journey began in 1934 in Jiangxi, a province in the southern reaches of our country, hemmed in by mountains on three sides. First the soldiers fled west, and then doubled back through sodden, craggy trails, marching at night. Teacher Fan told us the soldiers had been half-starved, hollowed out by high fevers and bloody shits. Then they straggled up along the border with Tibet, along cliffs so steep that sure-footed horses tumbled to their deaths. That detail had haunted me: I’d pictured the riders caught up in the stirrups, the tangle of limbs and hooves; I’d heard their screams and the neighing terror of the horses.
