“DO NOT FEAR,” a note read, two nights after his death sentence was proclaimed. “SHE WILL FIGHT FOR YOU.”
And then came the message, “FATHER HAS SET MARRIAGE DATE. SHE IS RESISTING.” Fang read the note again and again. His hopes of eloping with Sulin had been dashed, his execution was at hand, and what power could a daughter exert over her father, who held the lives of thousands in his hands? Still, Fang took comfort in her steadfastness, and waited.
The day before his execution, Fang read the final note with disbelief. “YOU WILL BE FREED. YOU HAVE ORDERS TO LEAVE THE VILLAGE WITHIN THREE DAYS.”
True to Longshan’s word, Fang was banished from the commune with only the clothes on his back. Years later he learned that Sulin had threatened to take her own life if her father took Fang’s. And yet, he had been devastated to find out that Sulin did marry her betrothed.
The long march of decades had not quelled Fang’s feelings for Sulin, and he wondered how he could forget her now, after meeting her face-to-face. The fiery spark of her spirit enchanted him, even frightened him. He was out of schemes now; she had refused to rekindle that flame, and all he had gained from this venture was a bit of insight into his friend Longshan’s plight.
ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE SIXTH MONTH, THE VILLAGERS of Lanping received a notice that their evacuation was scheduled for the coming year, after spring festival. The construction of the dam was in progress, and any families that did not vacate their homes on time would be fined 17,000 yuan.
Longshan showed the notice to his wife. “I cannot believe those bastards. Our efforts have been futile. After our visit, I thought we were still talking over the resettlement money, but this letter”—here he slapped the thin parchment with the heel of his hand—“sounds like it’s a done deal. We will not have enough funds to get a decent house; we may have to go into this with another family.”
His wife sighed. “I expected as much. There is my brother’s family. Or your sister, I suppose.”
“My sister is upset at me for bringing Fang Shuping on that trip. We’d best leave that stone unturned.” Longshan paced across the room, tapping a pencil against his forehead. “The worst of this is that we won’t be able to support ourselves. Who can get by on scraps thrown to a dog? You should have been there, Min Yi. There was barely a stand of trees as far as the eye could see. A barren, demon-cursed landscape, that’s where our new home will be. We’d have better luck growing crops on the dirt between our toes. I’m going to call an emergency meeting of our council. We’ve got to do something soon before the government starts sending the construction crews here.”
Longshan grabbed his coat and headed for the door. His wife followed him with a fretful look. “Be careful, the walls have ears, you know.”
“If nobody speaks up, we might as well be deaf and mute. Heaven knows we’ve put up with enough.”
On the night of the emergency meeting, a temperamental wind blew through the old factory courtyard, cresting over the tops of surrounding peaks, which loomed in the dark like displeased spirits. The village leaders pulled their jackets close to their bodies and braced against the sideways shear of the wind. They spoke rapidly that night, as if their words would be swallowed up in the gale as soon as they were uttered.
“We should march right up to their marble and brick offices and demand that we be treated decently!” said one villager from across the river.
“You can bet the police will shoo us away like hobos!” cried another.
A man with a quiet, dignified voice spoke up. “Maybe we can take this to the courts. We have a case here. We cannot live on that steep hillside. A few jin of corn a year, that’s all the land will yield.”
“Sir, that’d be a fine idea if we had the resources. My sister’s village tried to petition the courts over another matter, and it cost them 10,000 yuan up front. And they lost anyway. Their land was taken by a power company.”
The villagers muttered among themselves. Where could they come up with 10,000 yuan? The grizzled old man who had advised restraint at the earlier meetings stroked his beard thoughtfully. “The courts would be an option if the odds were in our favor. But without a lawyer, what are we but a bunch of squirrels trying to hoard empty nuts? No, there are no guarantees if you take things to the courts. We may have laws in this country, but it’s the folks in power who will decide our fate.”
“Well, if our means are limited, we do have one possible recourse,” said Longshan. “And that’s Beijing.”
The crowd erupted in whispers, like a swirl of leaves caught in the wind. The idea of petitioning in Beijing was met with skepticism, hope, awe, uncertainty, curiosity. Nobody had done such a thing before. And yet, the news relayed by sons and daughters in the big cities indicated that the Party’s top leaders did care about the plight of the peasants. Beijing would listen. And Beijing was perhaps the only recourse.
Over the next three weeks, the villagers drafted a petition for their case. Longshan asked Fang to help polish their written plea, and a ten-page document was produced, taken to the post office, and postmarked for Beijing. The clerk gave Longshan a hard look, and asked him to fill out his particulars on a form, without revealing when the letter would arrive in the proper hands, or if it would even make the journey at all.
Longshan checked the postal mail with unfailing zeal, and when there was no sign of a reply after two months, he decided to make the long trip by train to the nation’s capital. Fortunately, as Fang had recommended, the villagers had kept a facsimile of the petition, which Longshan braced between two slabs of birch bark and wrapped in multiple layers of cloth in order to avoid any questions or suspicion.
TEN DAYS LATER, A DESPONDENT LONGSHAN ARRIVED HOME with his package still firmly wrapped in a bolt of cloth. He let out a long sigh, took a gulp of rice wine, and told his wife what had happened.
“When I arrived at the government office, I found a long line of petitioners going out the door. Like a wounded animal with its intestines sticking out. I waited for three days, until I finally got to a window. The clerk looked as worn out as the rest of us.”
Longshan took another swig of liquor and rubbed his eyes, which were twitchy and bloodshot from travel. “Three days of waiting, hoping, praying silently for somebody to take pity on our case, and what do you think happened? The clerk told me that matters like ours could not be handled. An agreement was in place and the project was moving forward. ‘But we didn’t sign any contract, ’ I insisted. The clerk just shook his head and sent me on my way. At least he took down some notes on our case.”
As autumn stamped its rusted seal on the land, a vengeful spirit began to plague Lanping and the other communities around the Songdu River. A cousin of Longshan’s was roughed up by thugs who claimed there were old debts to settle, although none of them had ever been seen in the villages. The buck-toothed fellow from the council said an intruder had poisoned his pigs in the night. Others had picked up flyers in town proclaiming the benefits of a new dam on the Songdu River. The notice offered a reward to those who dredged up evidence of any dissident activity.
Longshan suspected that their efforts had incited the wrath of the authorities. Yet nothing they had done showed any disrespect or disregard for their power. The debates of the council raged on with the upsetting news that compensation would actually be reduced, from 5000 to 4200 yuan per person. It was a sobering blow to their efforts. “Project costs have been higher than anticipated,” the letter claimed.
The following week, several villagers were visited by a well-dressed man who carried a police badge, demanding to know the whereabouts of a certain Chu Longshan. Now his fears were confirmed. The authorities had been tracking their efforts after all; perhaps there was even a spy at their meetings who reported on the proceedings. On the other hand, the petition may have been enough to raise the red flag.
On the first day of the eleventh month, a uniformed officer showed up at the house. He was flanked by two burly men who rested their hands on gu
n holsters. Longshan’s wife opened the door and was brusquely pushed aside as the officer demanded that their suspect appear before them.
Longshan came in from the yard, wiping the soupy excrement from the chicken coop on a rag before extending a hand to the men. The officer ignored his outstretched hand, and stiffly asked if he was Chu Longshan.
“Yes, what is the matter?” Longshan became very still, clutching the rag in both hands.
“You are under arrest, and must leave the premises now.” One of the burly men produced a pair of handcuffs.
“For what?” Chu Longshan cried. “Officer, I’ve been a good citizen. I’ve paid my taxes. I—”
“You have been obstructing law and order, but we understand you may not be the only one getting in the way of the government’s wishes.”
“Wishes? What wishes? You mean the Gaoshanlu dam, right? We’re only asking for fair compensation. We haven’t given anyone any trouble.”
Cold metal dug into Chu Longshan’s wrists, and the burly men dragged him by the handcuffs toward their waiting car, its engine still running.
The men shoved Longshan into the back and sat on each side of him during the ride to the county jail. Longshan dared not ask any more questions. He thought of his wife, whose brow contorted in fear as the authorities took him away. He wondered what the other village leaders would do; surely, they would learn the reason for his disappearance, but would they step up to the fight? Was there one amongst the council who would be bold enough? And then there was Fang. Could his friend defend him, just as he had done for Fang half a lifetime ago? For now, only one thing was certain: a cold prison cell, where cobwebs shimmered in the damp of autumn, and the company of men who committed crimes of a questionable nature, for which they could only be pitied.
25
THE INTERIOR OF THE WAN BAO HOTEL BORE AN EERIE resemblance to the Jade Dragon in Wushan. Now that Mei Ling was employed as the service clerk of the eleventh floor, she would put on her uniform each morning and pack away memories of home, much like the torn, unsalvageable linens tossed into the back of the laundry room.
It did not take long for Mei Ling to learn the mundane duties of her job—greeting customers in the hallway from her station, servicing them with fresh towels or drinks, and providing directions to the hotel’s services. “Business Center is open until eight. Computer, copier, and fax available for a reasonable fee.”
“The bar? Second floor. This way, xian sheng.” It struck her now, more than ever before, that she would address a strange man as she would her husband. Xian sheng, first born.
While she managed to keep the tipsy businessmen at bay, Mei Ling could not avoid getting into a few scrapes with her supervisor, a tough old bird with a sharp chin and fishhook brows named Lao Hu. Resting on her seniority, Lao Hu kept a fierce, watchful eye over her territory. Nobody could track the movements, the missteps, and failures of each of her underlings as closely as Lao Hu.With the pretty young hires she seemed particularly harsh. Mei Ling’s colleagues assured her it was simply part of the backroom drama in the Wan Bao, whose name boasted of ten thousand treasures and held as many torments.
Lao Hu gave her the most onerous of tasks; Mei Ling had to scrape at wine and cigarette stains in the rooms of careless patrons, and she was in no position to refuse on the grounds that these tasks belonged to another class of employees.While she was higher ranked than the custodial staff, Mei Ling knew her place in the pecking order as long as Lao Hu had her claws on the brood.
The sleek skyscrapers of Chongqing’s downtown lit up at night, and when Mei Ling finished an earlier shift, she would head out to the streets with a few coworkers. Enormous billboards displaying milky white women and stylish products gleamed alongside the Liberation Monument. A testament to those who triumphed over the Japanese in the War of Resistance, it seemed incongruous with the garish displays of wealth all around them.
At first, her presence in this city of ten million seemed incongruous as well. Chongqing was the size of one hundred Wushans, and even that town had seemed large to Mei Ling when she left her small village two years earlier. Yet she felt a kind of freedom in the big city she had not possessed since her marriage to Liu. She had responsibilities of course—a mother seriously ill, and a husband and child to provide for—but whatever was left over from her paycheck was hers to keep.
At the same time, Mei Ling felt a vague sense of unease about leaving Liu and Rose behind. She had gained some degree of acceptance from the child, and she could not help but hear echoes of reproach in the tottering steps of young children she passed on the streets. That woman has left her family, the voices cried; she only cares about herself. Selfish girl, she has deserted her brood. Mother hens don’t do that.
The incessant buzz of city life pushed away those nagging thoughts. In the dormitory she shared with five women, the drone of the television was strangely comforting. Her skirmishes with Lao Hu, however, were a new source of worry. She had stood up to the witch and refused an unreasonable task, an act that her colleagues looked upon with admiration. Yet Mei Ling was plagued afterward by thoughts that she had been too brash.
When a customer’s load of laundry was discovered missing, Mei Ling was summoned by Lao Hu, whose tongue was sharpened and ready for attack. “Young lady, you were responsible for taking the laundry from 1106 to the wash room, but no trace of the items can be found. Are you so bold as to steal a customer’s belongings, or just plain careless?”
Mei Ling denied the charges, but Lao Hu pressed further. “You’ll be sent to the basement to clean furnaces if this happens again.”
“Well, do what you want, but I don’t deserve those accusations. I’ll find those lost shirts, and if I don’t, I’ll spare you the trouble and quit.” Mei Ling turned on her heels and stormed out.
She was about to follow through on her word, but later that afternoon the shirts turned up, starched and folded, from the laundromat across the street, where they had been sent on subsequent orders by the customer. Still, Lao Hu blamed Mei Ling for neglecting to keep track of the transaction. Mei Ling was sent to the general manager of the service department to be reprimanded.
As she approached the twentieth floor of the Wan Bao, she prepared for a verbal lashing. She wondered if she should indeed resign and take her chances at finding another job.
The manager surprised Mei Ling by greeting her with a pleasant smile, and gesturing for her to sit down. The light from his desk lamp glowed warmly against the dull gray skyline. He extended his hand toward her. “I am Sun Daimen. And what is your name?”
“Mei Ling.... Chang Mei Ling,” she whispered, taken aback by his cordiality. She sank into the cushioned seat, which was more decorative than comfortable.
“Mrs. Lao tells me that you’ve been neglectful in your duties. Is that true?”
“She expects me to do things beyond my stated duties, and I’ve been happy to oblige, but I really shouldn’t be blamed for this mishap,” Mei Ling declared.
Sun Daimen nodded as she spoke, and once again, his response surprised her. “Don’t worry about it, Miss Chang. You’ve done your best. Mrs. Lao can be a little demanding sometimes. I’ll have a word with her.”
Mei Ling thanked him, although she knew it wouldn’t be the end of her troubles with Lao Hu. The manager rose up and shook her hand, sending a warm current through Mei Ling’s palms.When she left the office, Mei Ling felt the imprint of the man’s hands, which were strong but smooth as pearl against her skin. For the rest of the day, her thoughts kept returning to his demeanor, and she smiled whenever she remembered the glow of his eyes in the golden lamplight.
CHEN WEIJIN’S HEALTH HAD DETERIORATED SINCE MEI LING’S last conversation with her. Her belly had bloated up, and the hollow of her throat was tender and swollen. She awoke in the mornings feeling tired and dazed, as everything around her swam in a blurry, shimmering mass. The pain in her joints flared up when she bent down to stoke the wood pilings in the stove.
Mei Ling li
stened to her mother’s tired voice with anguish. Her deterioration tested Mei Ling’s faith in cruel ways. When she tried to be optimistic and strong for her mother, she would be rewarded only by bad news, and when she fell into despair there would be signs of renewed health. Mei Ling could only cradle the small phone in her hands, wishing she were there to comfort her mother and ease the pain in her body.
But Chen Weijin was not one to give in to despair, despite the hardships of life in a strange, faraway land, and a husband who had little tolerance for weakness, as he viewed her condition. His callousness repulsed Mei Ling, and drew her even closer to her mother. And while Mei Ling could provide her with medicines, and the balm of comforting words, she could not buffer her against his insensitivity.
In a more generous frame of mind, Mei Ling could see that their struggles in Guangdong had taken a toll on his ornery spirit. She had not been on cordial speaking terms with him since the wedding, and only wished to forget the whole sordid affair. And yet, Mei Ling began to wonder if she had married foolishly, out of a headstrong reaction to her father’s wishes.
Still, she felt it was her duty to continue sending money to Liu and Rose. She called Liu once a week, while he was at Tai’s, and learned of his progress. His broken leg was healing in measurable strides, and in another month he would be out of the cast. Liu’s voice was subdued, and she had trouble hearing him above the din of clanking pots in Tai’s kitchen.
“You’ve been good to Rose and me,” he said one evening. “I’ll make it up to you, Mei Ling.”
She bit her lip. His expression of gratitude, uttered with the innocence of a child, not only touched her, but also exposed the impurities of her heart. Removed from the small world of Wushan, she had drifted away from the Catholic community that had bathed her in the sweet affections of the elderly women. She felt far away now, from the women who chanted as they prayed and from Father Chong, whose answer for earthly sorrows was to find faith again in the heavens.
In the Lap of the Gods Page 22