by Aimee E. Liu
He moved his hips, coaxing. “Why?”
“For one thing, because I want to be able to read what you write!”
“You are my wife,” he said, still coaxing. “Not my business partner.”
The smoothness of his voice, the smug certainty she detected within that smoothness irked her so that she gave a quick jerk and flipped him to one side. The confusion that sparked in his eyes was surprisingly gratifying. “That’s just it,” she said. “I don’t want to be your wife!”
Now he was really confused.
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said quickly. “I mean I don’t want to be just your wife. Never, I never wanted that. Even on the train going out to Wyoming, I was thinking that’s exactly what we must not be. No, we must have business together, don’t you see? A shared mission. Work. Some larger enterprise that we’re in together, equally.”
He flopped back, shaking his head.
“I even thought how,” she said. “If I could read your work, I could translate it. I could write articles, drum up support for China among American readers the same way you do with your paper.”
Outside, it began to rain. “Too dangerous,” he said.
“Oh, pooh! Dangerous. There are lots of magazines—The Independent or Harper’s or Leslie’s—they run China articles all the time written by missionaries and diplomats. Why wouldn’t they jump for stories about the inside of Chinese life? Your stories about growing up. About the makings of the revolution in Japan. The hardship of peasant life under the Manchus. How the republic will change everything. We’ll write them together.”
He locked his eyes on the ceiling. “Americans want to believe their own stories about China. And about Chinese.”
“The magazines would pay us, Paul.”
“They will not pay a Chinese man. They will not publish article under Chinese man’s name. So what name do you use?”
“They will!”
“And if you give them your name, how do you explain your knowledge of such things? Do you write to them, I have married a Chinaman?”
“Paul!”
“Or do you use this Spanish name you make up for the marriage paper? And then why does this Spaniard know so much about China?”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
The rain quickened, causing the little bedside lamp to waver. Paul slid a hand over her hip, slowly up the folds of her gown to her breast. He lay his head on her shoulder, and she stroked his hair, simultaneously marveling and despairing at her willingness to accept tenderness and touch as substitutes for genuine understanding. “Would you love me more if I were Chinese?” she asked.
He lifted up and gave her a stern, almost rigid kiss on the mouth, then hovered over her as he spoke. “If you are Chinese, then you are not Hope. But Hope is my wife.”
“Why can’t you ever answer directly?”
“Your question is not direct. It is hypocritical.”
The giggle erupted before she could stifle it. “I think,” she said, “you mean hypothetical.”
Paul sighed, regarding her fondly. He waited for her laughter to subside. “Are you happy with me?”
“Oh, my darling, yes. More than I have any right to be. But you are a little intimidating.”
“Intimidating?”
“I mean, sometimes I feel… in awe of you. When we’re together—” she took his hand and placed it back on her breast, held it there to show what she meant “—everything else melts away, and all that matters is that we are together, but when we’re apart, sometimes even if you’re just sitting at your desk across the room, I feel I’m on the other side of an ocean.”
The shower let up. Paul said, “When you come to China you can understand. You can learn, feel, breathe these things.”
“Yet you don’t want me to read your work,” she said stubbornly.
He sighed. “Hope. I have begun studying from the age of seven to learn classical Chinese. Sometimes I write in this language, sometimes vernacular. These two separate languages. To print the Free Press we use twelve thousand ideograms, only for most simple, direct ideas.” He shook his head. “Of course, I am happy for you to learn, but you must not think I expect this.”
She chewed her lip, considering. It was daunting. “I’ll strike a bargain with you.”
“Bargain?”
She retrieved the volume that had fallen by the bed. “We’ll read the books in English that you want, but every other night you tell me one of your stories.” She gave him a hard look. “To prepare me for the day we go back.”
Over the next few months, Hope pulled Paul’s past from him the way a fisherman culls from the sea. She threw out questions and hauled in names, dropped lines and brought up memories. He told her about his boyhood tutor who fell asleep in the middle of lessons and recited Mencius in his dreams. He told of the sit-in demonstration he and his fellow students in Tokyo staged to protest school admission policies favoring Manchurian candidates. He remembered tricks that he’d played on friends in his youth, tragic tales of love and reversals of fortune among his old classmates, and the endless rumors of scandal and intrigue that surrounded China’s ruling elite. She learned of the so-called Mutual Love Association of Chinese girl students in Japan (actually a revolutionary group) and one member who masqueraded as a sailor’s mistress to bring coded instructions onto freighters bearing Sun Yat-sen’s armaments.
The seriousness with which Hope approached their nightly sessions amused Paul. She would stretch out in bed with her delicate feet crossed at the ankles, her journal propped on her stomach, and take notes like a stenographer while he, for his part, lazed with hands clasped behind his head in a chair across the room. They were not far apart, but neither were they linked in any way, and occasionally, when he had been talking for some time about Chang Chih-tung or Yüan Shih-k’ai or Li Yüan-hung, he would ask if she was following, and she would purse her lips, busily continuing her note-taking, and shake her head as if annoyed. But when he tried to steal a look at her journal she would pull it close like an unfinished drawing.
“No article,” he warned.
“No,” she said. “Just notes for me, so I won’t forget.”
October 19, 1906
I think the real reason Paul opposes my idea of articles for the American press may be that he doesn’t trust me to deliver accurate information, but I’ve come up with a way around this. I can call Paul simply The Revolutionist, put down his stories directly as he relays them (plus or minus a small bit of my own editing) and sign a pen name. No one need know our relationship or even our actual identity. I know in my bones that this will work. For all the “as told to’s” about natives in New Guinea and the Amazon and excursions to the heart of Africa, I’ve never seen anything like the tales in Paul’s repertoire. Like the one he told me last night, which gives a new glimpse into his egalitarian views on women—and at least the beginning of some sympathy for his mother. I want this to work because we need it to work. Hearing him talk, replaying his words, making them part of myself is the closest I can come to slipping inside his soul, to smelling and seeing and entering this world to which otherwise I have no access.
Here, then, is how this most recent story would appear, if I should work up the courage to go through with this plan.
Red Beards and Big Feet: The Taiping Rebellion Retold
“I would like to set the record straight,” The Chinese Revolutionist began, “as to the true story of the Taiping Rebellion. I would relate not the slander spread by the embattled Manchus and foreigners who stood to lose their vast holdings if the Taipings had been victorious, but the stories my mother told of the days when the Taipings came to our city.”
“I know little about the Taipings,” I urged him, “except that they were Christians, and that China’s new revolutionists have taken them as heroes. I am eager to know their true story.”
This, then, is what he told …
The Taipings captured my province in 1867, eight years b
efore I was born. The official story is that Taipings were barbarians, devils with red beards who pillaged and slaughtered. That is what the people were told, so that they would fear and resist the Taipings. But my mother told how it really was when the Redbeards came through Hankow.
At the time, my father was in the capital taking his examinations, and the family was living in our home village of Pai-sha-chou. Of course, the whole province was in chaos. Taipings already occupied Hong Mountain and the river was filled with warships all lit up like dragons. The family managed to get across the river to Hankow just before the Taipings landed at Yellow Goose Jetty and began their attack. People said the Ts’aohu city gate had been breached and scores of women were drowning themselves to avoid being raped by the Redbeards. My elder brother and sister were still in swaddling then, and my mother dared not flee. She locked the doors and waited.
Before first light, Taiping soldiers filled the street blowing an ox horn and shouting, “The Eastern King has ordered that all people be settled this morning. All with a home should return home. The homeless should go to our shelters. Men to men’s and women to women’s. Any man attempting to enter the women’s shelter will be beheaded. Any woman going to the men’s shelter will be strangled. Any Taiping brothers who rape, rob, kill, or burn will be beheaded. This is the order of the Eastern King and must be immediately obeyed.”
Before noon a woman with big, unbound feet, bright red pants, and a tightly belted white shirt led a group of Taiping soldiers wearing red turbans and wielding swords down our street. They searched the home where my family was staying and confiscated all red material. They asked if my mother was hiding evil spirits. My mother did not know what they meant, but she answered, “Our home has never had evil spirits.” Only later did she realize that the Taipings called Ch’ing soldiers evil spirits.
The next day a relative who had joined the Taiping Army came to tell my mother that he was leaving to fight the wind. The troops were fanning out from the city in all directions.
My mother visited the women’s shelter several times. The women in charge were all big-foot barbarian women from Kiangsi. The Taiping women cooked and brought fuel for the shelter and kept order, one bigfoot for every ten homeless women. There was no charge for room or food.
When the soldiers came back from fighting the wind they called together several tens of thousands of the brothers. They gave every person one piece of red cloth for a turban, and they arrayed several thousand red ships on the river. At the time the water was very low, and from Hanyang gate the ships were lined abreast so that they appeared as a floating bridge all the way to the Dragon King Temple. At the sight about fifty Ch’ing soldiers still hiding in Hankow lost their courage and came forward. At the shout of a single Taiping, the Ch’ings all threw down their swords and knelt, allowed their hands to be tied so that they could be taken prisoner.
Ten days later the Eastern King boarded a large ship and led the flotilla downstream. Ch’ing troops moved back in behind him. But the people of our province had learned that the stories spread about the evil Taipings were not true. They had seen how quickly the Ch’ing troops would surrender, how little they would do to protect the people. Half a century later, the Ch’ings have not changed. And the spirit of the Taipings lives on in revolutionary leaders like Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the thousands of Chinese—men and women alike—who have vowed to bring democracy to China.
Even as I set these words down I am filled with something akin to dread. Would I have possessed the courage Paul’s mother showed? Stranded, with two young children, amid chaos and terror, yet she stood up to the invaders and was courageous enough to see them as humans instead of the monsters she had been taught to expect. Like mother, like son, I suppose, and perhaps this explains how Paul could journey to the land of the barbarians and see me clearly enough to take me for his own.
He says that age and loss have hardened his mother. Those two young children died before Paul was born. His father was away for months at a time, leaving his mother at the mercy of his first two wives, and though finally he sent for her to join him during his appointment as viceroy in Canton—Paul’s birthplace—she contracted malaria there, and was left barren.
Oh, so much about the life of this woman makes me quail. Starting with the ghastly practice of footbinding and carrying through that hideous tradition of concubinage, in which the only measure of a woman’s worth is her ability to bear sons! Paul does not subscribe to the views of his countrymen toward the female sex, and yet he cannot help but be a product of his culture even as he fights it.
I find myself wondering about his wife, the way he left her to go off on his revolutionary escapades (making friends with that “Mutual Love” group!). I sympathize with her in spite of myself. And I worry for Paul’s children. When will they see their father again? Will I ever meet them? Is there any way I can find acceptance in the hearts of people whose ways are so completely alien to mine? That we all share this man is a source of continual fascination and amazement to me. It is a tribute to his breadth of knowledge and sensitivity that this is possible, but there is another side of the equation that gives me pause. He seems so content to keep me in my world, so reluctant for me to probe into his. Why does he discourage me from learning his language? Why not tell me about his children? Why not introduce me to his friends? If I were to draw a diagram, I would show our situation as a straight line, with Paul in the center holding me by one hand and his Chinese family by the other. In my fantasy, I would change that drawing to a circle by linking my free hand to that of his family. I’ve no idea what concessions we would all have to make, but after speaking with Donaldina I am sure of at last one imperative. I must bear Paul a son.
All my visions of business together—of serving as a helpmate in Paul’s revolution, of making him a safe home and schooling myself in his political ambitions—are well and good, Donaldina told me, as long as I am thinking like an emancipated American. But it counts for nothing in the Chinese mind. And deep down I must reconcile myself with the fact that Paul’s mind is Chinese. My task as wife is to bear him children. That he does not mention my failure to conceive in our half-year of marriage bespeaks his respect and love for me, but it does not mean he is not waiting.
Donaldina’s plain language has forced me to look my predicament squarely in the eye. I, too, want children. And what heavenly children we will have! But they cannot be the hallowed offspring of a typical Chinese marriage. They will be called mongrels. They will be despised as half-breeds. And unless I do everything in my power to protect them, they will endure worse prejudice than any I myself ever knew. But I will protect them. I will love them with all my heart, and we will prove that those who despise us are wrong. They are nothing.
5
The long-awaited answer arrived by telegram in late October.
Marriage forbidden. Bride Ling-yi awaits your return.
“Who is Bride Ling-yi?” Hope asked, judiciously disregarding the first comment as moot.
“Youngest daughter of my father’s friend.” Paul chewed on a thumbnail. “She used to play at our house with my sisters. She had teeth like a beaver’s and on her cheek a purple birthmark in the shape of an axe.”
“Mm,” Hope said. “Pretty, then?”
He grunted and folded his arms. “This is the first I hear of her in twenty years.”
“And what exactly is this you’re hearing?”
He looked at her gravely. “I will cable,” he said. “I will tell her it cannot be.”
His telegram read: Marriage cannot be undone. Hsin-hsin is wife of my heart. I take no other.
Within days came an extravagantly long reply instructing that Paul’s duty was first to his family, and this marriage caused his whole clan to lose face. Having one wife did not prevent him from taking another, and Nai-li had betrothed him to Ling-yi.
Unlike Hope’s father, her mother-in-law made no mention of love.
For the next month the arguments slid back and forth acro
ss the ocean. Neither Paul nor his mother would relent, and by Thanksgiving the cables ceased. When it became clear that she could not persuade Paul to give up his alien bride, his mother simply pulled away. As he’d predicted, she cut off all financial support. Paul’s son and daughter became Nai-li’s hostages.
This turn of events redoubled Hope’s determination to bring in some extra income. She sent off the article about the Taipings to The Independent. She increased her tutorial hours, milking her students even more for background details to fortify her understanding of China, and during the early evening hours before Paul’s return home, she applied herself to learning five new Chinese ideograms per day. Though she could not account for the feeling with any rational explanation, she felt she was fighting for her life. None of this did she reveal to her husband.
For his part, Paul was philosophical. “Nothing to be done,” he said simply. The moment he said this, as they were standing in the kitchen looking out on a scene of flying, withered leaves, a chill ran through her. There was a flatness to his voice that made her turn and stare at him. His face was as passive and accommodating as a blank slate, and the words, still bright on his lips, seemed to rise of their own accord. How could she know then that in future years she would come to view their Mandarin translation, mei fatse, as China’s fatal mantra? She could not possibly, and yet the ease and naturalness with which those words coasted from Paul’s mouth utterly paralyzed her. Only after he’d come back to himself and gruffly left the room did she realize why this simple phrase had such an effect on her: it was utterly at odds with the man she thought she had married.
But Paul’s fatalism was like a charm, and once he’d surrendered the notion that he and Hope could exert any further force on their destiny, events shifted as by some heavenly hand. “Remember Minister Tuan?” he called out one December evening, seconds after walking in the door.
“Minister Tuan?” In the kitchen Hope wiped her floury hands on her apron and glanced to make sure the soup was not boiling over.