by Lisa See
“Hulan.” The syllables sounded intimate—almost loving—in the darkness. “I have it, Hulan.” Quon sighed into the ebony vacuum.
Hulan’s hand found David’s shoulder, felt its way to his face, and clamped down over his mouth. She crept closer to him, and when he felt her hair on his face he knew she was leaning over him.
Her movements seemed impossibly loud, and somewhere nearby Quon moved in response. “Come to me, Hulan,” he murmured. “Fulfill your destiny now, with me.”
David tried to shake her hand free, but her grip was unnaturally strong. Then she broke away from him and plunged into the inky void. He rolled over, reached out, felt nothing. He heard the two of them wrestling in the blackness, then a long cry cut through the air. As the sound fell away, then abruptly ended, David realized that the person must have plummeted into one of the crevasses. What he couldn’t tell was if it had been a man’s or a woman’s voice or to whom the thready breathing that remained belonged. He felt the ground for a rock or the flashlight—anything he could use as a weapon. He heard the other person move, slithering across the ground toward him.
“David”—his wife’s voice came to him strong in the darkness—“stay where you are. I’ll come to you.”
EPILOGUE
THE RAINS FINALLY SUBSIDED. WHILE NO ONE COULD BELIEVE everything that was written in the China Daily — or the International Herald Tribune, for that matter—the floods were devastating. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the Minzu Yuan dike in Hunan Province collapsed, creating a landslide that took out several hundred homes, then sent downstream a huge wave, which washed away the next two villages. This tragedy served as a reminder to all of past and possible future tidal waves.
Yichang, near the Three Gorges Dam, reported the highest water level to date, with the flood cresting at fifty-two meters. Twenty-two million acres of farmland had been swamped, 2.9 million homes destroyed, and 2,500 deaths reported. Outbreaks of hepatitis A and typhoid had been contained—not bad considering that although only 1.8 million people had actually been evacuated, more than 140 million people had ultimately been affected. However, the economic cost—in terms of crops lost, manufacturing production shut down, and homes and property ruined—was staggering. Although monsoon season was not yet over, the Central Meteorological Station expressed confidence that the worst was past. The cleanup began.
David and Hulan were extremely busy during the week after the events in the cave. Working side by side, they pieced together more of what had happened—both personally and in their respective cases. Hulan interrogated Officer Su, who was recuperating in a local hospital, while in Hong Kong Investigator Lo questioned Bill Tang, who was being held for the murder of Dr. Ma. Both Su and Tang were singing like proverbial canaries, and both were well-aware that if Michael Quon wasn’t found, they’d be made the scapegoats. Quon had fallen into one of the tunnels in the cave that led down to the river, but his body had not been recovered. If he’d somehow survived, then he’d disappeared into the black world. As for the ruyi, both Hulan and David hoped it had washed out to sea and would never be retrieved, for it had already brought out the worst greed and covetousness in those aware of its existence.
Hulan had been changed by what had happened in the cave. David had heard it in her voice when he was crawling through. He’d seen it in her eyes when he reached her. She was a different woman now, and he was deeply grateful. David had changed too. For the first time in his life, he’d gotten totally out of his head and had operated on a purely physical level. His body had paid a price for that, though. When he saw Bashan’s only doctor, he received thirty stitches and was diagnosed with five broken ribs and a concussion. Hulan joked that the concussion may have been what had caused him to act so out of character.
David also spent a lot of time agonizing over what happened to Wu Huadong’s wife and baby. After he had gone into the tunnel, the chopper pilot saw the widow dash into the storm and straight out and over the cliff, following, it turned out, the same path her husband had taken a few weeks earlier. That was the official version, but David knew something the others didn’t. He’d misread the widow’s gesture when she’d held her baby up to him and said, “The people will know.” She hadn’t been preserving the location of the hidden chamber; she’d been trying to protect her child. Sadly, although the widow had plenty of money stashed in the house—Lily had been generous in her final payments to Brian—she was still an uneducated peasant with a half-Caucasian child. She had no way to know the world of options that awaited her outside the Three Gorges. Perhaps her suicide was inevitable, but David felt his actions had accelerated the process. He’d carry those deaths with him forever. Hulan knew exactly how he felt.
By looking for greed and the inability of people to tell the truth, Hulan had found that even those who’d been altruistic and honest had helped create the cascade of events that had resulted in so many tragedies. Catherine, who had set so much in motion the previous summer with her prank about the Nine Tripods, now proved to be very forthcoming. In Brian’s efforts to get away from Lily and her obsession, he’d found his beach on the river’s edge, where he met Wu Huadong’s young wife. Their romance had started with small gestures—a little money from him, a container of noodles from her. Eventually, their picnics turned into something more. In his journal, Brian wrote that he’d gotten Lily to hire Huadong to help the couple escape their brutal poverty; in fact, it had been a very convenient way to get the husband out of the picture. When Brian returned this year, he’d been surprised to find the peasant girl hugely pregnant. Two weeks later, the baby was born. Huadong had taken one look at the infant and thrown himself over the cliff. When his body was found in the whirlpool, the other archaeologists mistakenly blamed Lily. Why had Brian confided all of this to Catherine? He was smart in so many ways, she said, but he didn’t have much experience with the messiness of real life. He wanted her advice, and she gave it.
From the journal, what Hulan learned in the cave from Michael Quon, and further interviews with Catherine, other aspects of Brian’s last year unraveled. Last summer Wu’s wife had told Brian her greatest secret—her husband’s clan had stood guard over this property and its hidden caverns for thousands of years. Brian had begun taking things from the chamber and selling them to Lily, which set in motion a whole other chain of events. Once Quon started making his increasingly threatening demands, Brian understood his fate. He’d fought to the death to protect something or someone. Since he’d already looted the chamber, even the most hard-bitten investigators chose to believe Brian had died for love.
David left Bashan for a day to accompany a team that descended on Cathay Antiquities in Hong Kong, where stolen artifacts from numerous sites, including Site 518, were found. He also paid a visit to Angus Fitzwilliams’s apartment. The auctioneer freely admitted that he’d ignored Bill Tang’s bid in favor of one by an older and more loyal Cosgrove’s customer. This was not a prosecutable crime, but shortly thereafter Fitzwilliams and his wife retired home to England.
David knew that Hulan saw everything in a geopolitical light—the struggle over image between countries, the battles within those countries for the hearts and minds of their citizens. But to him so much came down to familial actions—Catherine’s desire to impress her father, Brian’s desire to protect his child and its mother—that had resulted in the most deadly reactions. Perhaps none was more insignificant on the surface—but with more lethal results—than the pictorial message Brian had sent to his sister on his website.
In the photograph, Brian stood on a barren hillside with his arms outstretched as though he was presenting the whole panorama. Only Angela saw that his fingers were pointing to tiny golden mushrooms that had sprung up in the crannies around some rocks. Those mushrooms were known to surface after a rain above an Armillaria ostoyae, a much larger honey mushroom, which grew under the soil. Three years ago, Angela had been on a team that had discovered a twenty-five-hundred-year-old honey mushroom in Oregon that was three an
d a half miles in diameter, making it the largest organism ever found on the planet. What was now known as the Bashan Fungus was at least twice the size and perhaps twice as old.
It had grown from a single spore too small to see without a microscope. For thousands of years, black shoestring filaments had radiated underground, strangling roots, killing trees, and leaving behind a sticky substance. The fungus had spread across the surface of the earth, wiping out vegetation from the river’s edge to the tops of the hills above Site 518, from the outskirts of Bashan to another half mile past the Wu house. Rhizomorphs stretched down as far as ten feet and had permeated the caves, giving them their peculiar odor. Michael Quon had said the caves were alive; he just hadn’t known how alive they were.
In addition to the paleobotanists who’d arrived to study the fungus, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biocultural anthropologists, and linguists descended on Bashan. David and Hulan watched their activities with interest. Some were engaged in DNA testing, hoping to prove that the Wus were longtime descendants of the wild ones that Yu the Great had met in his travels. Since no coffin or mummified remains had been found, others researched the purpose of the chamber. Had Yu brought these artifacts with him as gifts of culture—music and art specifically—to the wild ones? Had the Wu clan been left to guard the treasures—the white jade chimes, the bi disks, the pottery, the weapons of war, and the ruyi? Or had the Wus been left to guard the fungus? Some believed that Yu left the ruyi with the Ba as a symbol of the tasks they were to do, just as Emperor Shun gave a symbol to Yu when he went about clearing the land of floods. Others thought that, instead of bringing culture and civilization, Yu’s gift had actually sown the seeds of the Ba’s destruction by birthing the invasive Bashan Fungus. Others wondered if the fungus could actually be shi tu, the “swelling mold” or “living earth” that Yu and his father had used to control the flood. Meanwhile, old Dr. Strong was doing his best to help a team examine Brian’s theory that not only had geography informed early Chinese language but this very area might be the birthplace of characters like dragon, cliff, cave, and river, predating those found on oracle bones by hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The land itself might be that long sought after proof of five thousand years of continuous Chinese culture.
Debates raged about Brian’s discoveries. Could one graduate student find both the Rosetta stone of Chinese language and China’s Holy Grail? Some felt that he’d just lucked into the ruyi, which, since it was lost again, was suspect anyway. Some felt that his theories about the connection between his so-called geographic dragon bones and the thoughts and culture of the people who dwelled in the gorges had limited academic validity. Others found his research truly significant and were thoroughly analyzing and critiquing his journal. All agreed that Brian’s premature death was a great loss to the field of archaeology and that further study was required.
Everyone would have to work quickly though. Although this had been a major discovery, the lower caverns would begin flooding in 2003, and by 2009 all of this area would be below the Lake Within the Gorges. This knowledge impelled a group of engineers to examine the impact the inundation might have on the dam. Would flooding the caverns—no one knew just how deep they went—trigger earthquakes? Might Ba Mountain collapse, causing a massive tidal wave? The scientists put a positive spin on these possibilities, but David was glad he wouldn’t be living downstream. In the meantime, every day the river saw more luxury cruise ships for tourists who were plying the waters between Chongqing and Wuhan for a last-chance view of the Three Gorges.
On Hulan’s last day in Bashan, she met with Vice Minister Zai on the veranda outside the guesthouse’s dining room. It was a beautiful day. Sun filtered through the bamboo, and the koi pond glistened. Zai, who’d arrived once the weather cleared, congratulated her on her success. He praised her for upholding virtue and compassion, eliminating those who destroyed order, and stamping out corruption. He reminded her that the excesses of the past could not be repeated or else, like previous dynasties, this one too would collapse.
“Remember that the slogans of Mao and Deng are not so different from those of any ruler,” Zai said. “Remember that the first Xia Dynasty collapsed through corruption.”
But by now she’d learned something about her nation’s history. Powerful slogans and great monuments did transcend time. Mao had understood this very well, but so had Confucius, who’d compiled the Shu Ching from many sources, and Qinshihuangdi, who’d built the Great Wall. What Zai and the men who controlled him had forgotten was that corruption comes in many forms. Building a dam—no matter how many patriotic slogans were used—wouldn’t divert the masses from the truth forever.
“A monument doesn’t make an empire,” Hulan told him.
“You’re right, Xiao Hulan,” Zai agreed, summoning up the diminutive he’d used with her when she was a child. “But it does encourage an atmosphere of political enthusiasm and harnesses it at the same time. This leads to stability. Without stability, nothing can be achieved and successes attained will be lost.”
“The problem with nationalist sentiment,” Hulan responded, “is that it focuses attention on leadership.”
“Again you are right,” Zai said, obviously pleased by her understanding. “If we are unable to meet the people’s expectations, we may find, to use an old expression, that in promoting nationalism, we have ‘mounted a tiger that cannot easily be dismounted.’”
Hulan and Zai quietly considered this as doves cooed and wind blew gently through the stand of bamboo.
“We have entered a new century,” Zai went on. “If you go back to the end of the nineteenth century, Britain still thought it ruled the world, but it was on its last legs. Go to the end of the twentieth century and America thought it ruled the world, but I believe it’s on its last legs and doesn’t realize it. Outsiders once called our country a sleeping dragon. That dragon has awakened. This will be China’s century. As the Great Helmsman said, the east wind will prevail over the west wind. You understand all of this, Hulan, because you are Chinese—”
“You’ve often accused me of not being Chinese enough.” She felt her courage waver for an instant, then she said, “I have a facility to understand the frailty of human nature. You sent me out here—”
“Because we have friends abroad and friends at the site who told us a trusted presence was required. Li Guo, the one they call a vulture, is a true patriot. For years he has kept the Ministry of Public Security apprised of Dr. Ma’s activities on behalf of State Security.”
“Li must also have told you that Brian had found the ruyi —”
“And that the boy was somehow involved with the All-Patriotic Society.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before you sent me here?”
“Following traditional leads had not helped you bring down the cult,” Zai explained. “I thought that letting you use your best gift—your intuition—might get a better result.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “You didn’t send me here to find Xiao Da. You sent me here because I’ve always been susceptible to the powerful and to indoctrination. I’ve always followed the wind, and you gambled that Xiao Da would find me.”
Zai had no response for this. How could he when she spoke the truth?
“You know my failings, and you’ve played upon them very well,” she continued sadly.
But the concerns of one individual were of minor interest to Zai when the philosophical conflicts between Zhu Rongji and Li Peng—and the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Public Security—were being played out in Beijing, where what mattered were issues such as how the dam would proceed and would a Confucian or Taoist methodology be followed, where consideration had to be given to how China would approach the United States about Michael Quon, his involvement in the All-Patriotic Society, and what he had attempted to do with VYRUSCAN at the Three Gorges Dam. Trying to control the masses was one thing; trying to destroy the dam was quite another.
A delib
erately defective version of VYRUSCAN—the program that had made Quon so wealthy—had been located in the Three Gorges Dam’s computerized safety system. Michael Quon had broken many of his many tenets, but perhaps this was the most insidious of all. He had used dreaded “Confucian” technology to try to disrupt the dam’s systems so that the river might run free again and he could solidify his position as a religious and political leader. He who controls the waters….
“The bombing of the embassy in Yugoslavia and the downing of the American spy plane pale in comparison to this scandal,” Zai said, “but is it worth political chest beating on either side of the Pacific? Is it worth tapping into the U.S.’s worst xenophobic fears about spies and terrorism at a time when our two countries need to work together to fight both of these threats? And what if worming versions of VYRUSCAN have been implanted either narrowly or broadly in the States? China’s future hinges on the U.S. staying economically strong for a while longer.”
Perhaps even more important, Hulan thought, was it worth riling up the masses to let them know of Michael Quon’s demonic acts against China? Was it worth more anti-American demonstrations? Or would this knowledge merely provoke unwanted questions about the dam’s vulnerability and the leadership’s vincibility?
“But why do we talk about all this?” Zai asked lightly. “What matters is that you and David are happy again. We will all go home to Beijing, and everything will be the same.”
“It will never be the same,” Hulan said. “I loved you like a father, but you were willing to risk our lives—”
“Nothing happened to you, and we have had a happy result,” he said reassuringly, but his features were filled with pain and remorse.