A Single Swallow

by Zhang Ling

  PRAISE FOR ZHANG LING

  “I am in awe of Zhang Ling’s literary talent. Truly extraordinary. In her stories, readers have the chance to explore and gain a great understanding of not only the Chinese mind-set but also the heart and soul.”

  —Anchee Min, bestselling author of Red Azalea

  “Few writers could bring a story about China and other nations together as seamlessly as Zhang Ling. I would suggest it is her merit as an author, and it is the value of her novels.”

  —Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

  “[Zhang Ling] tackles a work of fiction as if it were fact . . . With a profound respect for historical truth as it impacts the real world, she successfully creates characters and stories that are both vivid and moving.”

  —Shenzhen and Hong Kong Book Review

  “Zhang Ling’s concern for war and disaster has remained constant throughout the years as she delves deeply into human strength and tenacity in the face of extremely adverse situations.”

  —Beijing News Book Review Weekly

  “[In this novel] we see not only the cruelty of war but also humans wrestling with fate . . . The novel blends the harsh reality of war seamlessly into the daily lives of the common people, weaving human destiny into the course of the war . . . A Single Swallow puts the novelist’s ability and talent on full display.”

  —Shanghai Wenhui Daily

  OTHER TITLES BY ZHANG LING

  Gold Mountain Blues

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Zhang Ling

  Translation copyright © 2020 by Shelly Bryant

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Laoyan by People’s Literature Publishing House in China in 2017. Translated from Mandarin by Shelly Bryant. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2020.

  Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9780761456957 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 0761456953 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542041508 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542041503 (paperback)

  Cover design by David Drummond

  First edition

  To all the names that remain unrecorded on monuments

  CONTENTS

  William E. Macmillan, or Mai Weili, or Billy, or Whatever

  Ian Ferguson: Comrades, Khakis, an Uninvited Guest, and All Sorts of Things

  Liu Zhaohu: Sishiyi Bu, the Village with Forty-One Steps

  Pastor Billy: Okamura Yasuji’s Wolf

  US Navy Historical Archives Collection: Three Letters from Personnel in the Field

  Ian Ferguson: Miles’s Dog

  Liu Zhaohu: Death Is Such a Difficult Thing After All

  Ian Ferguson: A Game I Allegedly Fixed

  Pastor Billy: Metamorphosis from Pupa to Butterfly

  East American Chinese Herald: In Commemoration of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan

  Ghost and Millie: A Dialogue

  Pastor Billy and Ian: Between Goodbye and Farewell

  Liu Zhaohu: Chiang Kai-shek’s Discarded Old Shoes

  Pastor Billy: An Apology Seventy Years Overdue

  Liu Zhaohu: Secret Curls

  Ian Ferguson: The Tale of a Button

  Pastor Billy: What We Took Away and What We Left Behind

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  William E. Macmillan, or Mai Weili, or Billy, or Whatever

  I have many names. Almost every time I meet someone, I get a new one.

  According to the birth certificate from the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, my name is William Edward Sebastian de Royer-Macmillan. As far as I recall, my full name was used only three times during my life. First, on my birth certificate, then on my application to the Boston University School of Medicine, and finally on my marriage certificate. No one ever actually called me by such an oversized, regal name. Even when I was eight and stole a box of candy canes from the convenience store and the shopkeeper informed my father, he summoned me to his desk by calling me just William de Royer-Macmillan. That was the ultimate expression of his anger. Sometimes I tried to say my full name when I was alone, and if I could even manage to get the whole thing out, it took at least two breaths. My family and American classmates called me Billy, except my mother, who just called me B. I often felt my mother—a housewife who cared for a sick husband and five children—possessed the skills of a great mathematician and was thus always able to reduce life’s complex details to their simplest, most uncomplicated form, getting to the root of things in just one shot.

  When I was twenty-five and about to leave for China as a missionary, my parents gave me a Chinese name, Mai Weili, a transliteration of the first part of my surname and my given name. In my church, I was called Pastor Mai. The residents of nearby villages were much less respectful. The people who came every Wednesday for a free bowl of porridge called me Lao Zhou, a play on the Chinese word zhou, meaning “porridge,” and a common Chinese surname. It made me sound like an old man, even though I was only in my twenties. The people who came for medical care called me Mr. Mai to my face, but behind my back, they called me Doctor Foreigner. Those who came for porridge or medicine far outnumbered those who came for prayer, but I wasn’t discouraged. I believed that after they had partaken of the goodness of God, they would eventually consider the way of the Lord. I learned early on that spreading the Gospel in China would depend on a good pair of legs, not just words. The legs upon which the Gospel traveled were porridge and medicine. Of course, the school was important too, but compared to porridge and medicine, the school was at most a crutch. That’s why I needed six porters when I disembarked in Shanghai. Clothes and books only accounted for half of what was in my trunks. The rest was all medical equipment and medicine I had acquired with funds raised in America.

  My parents were missionaries sent to China by the Methodist Church. Their tracks covered almost the whole of Zhejiang province from north to south and east to west. For them, living in one place for six months was an eternity. Because of their itinerant lifestyle, none of the four children born to my mother before me survived. Then, when she turned thirty, she was suddenly overcome with panic. My parents had endured beds infested with bedbugs, porridge crusted with insects, leaky roofs made of scraps of tarp nailed together, and outhouses consisting of only bamboo poles, but the fear of being childless forever was beyond bearing. That year, after struggling painfully with their consciences, they applied to the parent church for permission to return home.

  The year after they returned to the US, they had me. Over the next seven years, my mother gave birth to two more boys and twin girls. Out of gratitude, or perhaps guilt, they dedicated me, their eldest son, to the church, just as Abraham had offered Isaac. My missionary destiny was fixed before I was born—I heard God’s call while still in the womb.

  Even so, I did not act rashly. I waited until I graduated from medical school and finished my residency before I left for China. What followed proved the wisdom of this decision—and perhaps its cruelty.

  My parents had lived in China for twelve years. After returning to Amer
ica, they talked endlessly about their time there. My siblings and I listened over and over to stories about how farmers in the Jiangnan countryside grew tea with waterlogged compost from grass and wood ash, or how families on the water trained herons to catch fish, or what the women ate during their confinement period after giving birth, or how, when times were tough, the housewives would add wild herbs to their porridge to assuage hunger. And so, twenty-six years after they left China, following their path to Zhejiang, when I saw the stone steps in the water, sampans crossing the river, children riding buffaloes, and the white camellias in full bloom on the slopes and heard the angry-sounding Jiangnan dialect, I was not surprised. It seemed, rather, infinitely familiar, like a dream I’d had again and again for many years. It seemed not like my future life, but like my past life.

  And now, looking at you, Gunner’s Mate Ian Ferguson, and you, Special Operations Soldier Liu Zhaohu, I am indeed face-to-face with my past life. Today is August 15, 2015. It’s been a full seventy years since we three made our agreement. What is seventy years? For a worker bee producing honey, it’s more than 560 lifetimes. For a buffalo plowing a field, it’s perhaps three—if it is not slaughtered prematurely. For a person, it’s almost an entire life. In a history book, it’s probably just a few paragraphs.

  But in God’s plan, it’s an instant, the blink of an eye.

  I still remember every detail from that day seventy years ago. The news was first transmitted at your camp. The operator who sent hydrology reports to Chongqing was the first to hear the Japanese emperor’s “Jewel Voice Broadcast” on the radio. The emperor’s voice was hoarse and choked, and his words as formal as his tone, his speech pedantic and meandering.

  “After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining to our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure . . . However, it is according to the dictate of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”

  At first, no one understood what was being said. After listening to the news commentary, you learned the speech was called the “Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the Greater East Asia War.” In fact, there’s a name for the event that is easy to understand. It’s called surrender, even though that word was not in the emperor’s speech.

  The madness that began in your camp spread like the flu to every household in Yuehu, which translates to “Moon Lake” in English. You cut quilts and winter clothes into strips and wrapped them around sticks, dipped them in tung oil, and set them on fire. The torches burning across the hillside made it seem as if the forest slopes had caught fire. God had mercy on you, arranging this day of madness in midsummer so you didn’t have to worry about needing warm bedding on a cold autumn night. Then the villagers crowded into the clearing where your unit held the daily drills. Normally, it was heavily guarded and civilians were not allowed to enter, but the sentry didn’t stop anyone. Indeed, there were no civilians that day, since everyone was an interested party. You set off firecrackers, drank toasts, yelled and danced like crazy, carried children aloft on your shoulders, and handed each man an American-made cigarette. Even more, you were all eager to kiss a woman—it had probably been a long time since you’d smelled the hair or touched the skin of a woman—but the commander at headquarters in Chongqing, Miles, had given strict orders, and though you didn’t obey completely, you didn’t dare go too far either. The next day when the sun had risen, the people of Yuehu found that their dogs and chickens had failed to sound the usual wake-up call, having all sounded themselves hoarse the previous day.

  That day seventy years ago, the celebrations continued until midnight. After the crowds dispersed, you two—Ian Ferguson, gunner’s mate first class of Naval Group China, and Liu Zhaohu (the last character in your name, hu, meaning “tiger,” in many ways the perfect name for you), a Chinese officer in training at the camp of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization—weren’t done celebrating. You came to my quarters. Ian brought two bottles of whisky, which he’d gotten a few days earlier while at the commissariat to get the mail. In the shabby kitchen of my house, the three of us drank ourselves into a stupor. That day, there was no military discipline. Even God closed one eye. Any mistake made then could be forgiven. You, Liu Zhaohu, said whisky was the worst drink under the sun, with a stench like cockroaches floating in urine. Even so, it didn’t stop you. You raised your cup for round after round. Later, when we were all half drunk, you suggested the scheme.

  You said no matter which of us three died first, after death, we would return to Yuehu each year on this day. When we were together, we would drink again.

  We felt your proposal was absurd. You said “after death,” not “in the future.” No one knows when another’s final day will be or the day of his own death. The realm after death is something the living have no way of understanding. Now we see that you were the sage among us. You had already foreseen that with the emperor’s “Jewel Voice Broadcast,” we were to go our separate ways and that our paths might never cross again. The living can’t control their own days, but the dead are not thus bound. After death, the soul is no longer limited by time, space, or unexpected events. The soul’s world has no boundaries. To the soul, the entire universe and all eternity are just a thought away.

  As we drank that night, we slapped each other’s backs and shook hands and, amid our laughter, accepted Liu Zhaohu’s proposal. That day seemed far away, so we weren’t completely serious. The war had ended. Peace pushed death to its proper place, many steps away from us. I was the oldest of us, and I was only thirty-nine.

  I thought I might be the first to make it to our rendezvous at Yuehu Village. I just didn’t expect it to come so fast. I had no idea I would die just three months after we had made our appointment.

  When I first met the two of you, I had been living in China for over ten years. Like any local, I could easily pick up a peanut with chopsticks, skillfully tie or untie the intricate cloth buttons on my tunic, or, with a bouncing gait, carry a pair of half-filled water buckets on a shoulder pole up a mountain trail. I could speak the local dialect almost flawlessly and even explain most of the content of a government notice to villagers. I had prayed with dying cholera patients and had myself been infected with typhus passed through the fleas on rats. I had been trapped in a burning house and nearly suffocated. I had experienced a three-day grain shortage. When the air raids came, I was in Hangzhou and only barely managed to get to the raid shelter in time. One of the most terrifying experiences was when I encountered bandits while walking one night. Although my wife, Jenny, and I were dressed in local style, as soon as they passed us, they saw we were foreigners. They assumed our wallets would be fuller than a local person’s. Brandishing knives, they searched us thoroughly, only to find we had nothing. I believe it was the terror of that event that caused poor Jenny to die during her miscarriage shortly thereafter.

  But in every danger, God provided a narrow path by which I might escape. I did not die of war, famine, or epidemic disease. I died by my own hand. The medical knowledge I had received at Boston University helped me save the lives of many others—though my wife was not among them. Only later did I realize that the lives I’d saved had a price, and that was my own life. It was my own medical skills that ultimately undid me.

  After our drunken celebration, you two made your way through several cities in Jiangsu and Shanghai to assist the Nationalist government in maintaining order and accepting the Japanese surrender. I, on the other hand, took the Jefferson back to America. My mother had written that my father was seriously ill and hoped to see his eldest son—the Isaac he had placed on the altar, whom he had not seen for many years—one more time before he died. As a civilian, I didn’t have to wait under the point system to earn a spot on a ship home the way a demobilized soldier like Ian did. So without much fuss, I was able to
buy a spot on the ocean liner. In the end, I didn’t see my father—not because he died before we were reunited, but because I did.

  In Shanghai, waiting for the ship, I stayed in the home of a Methodist missionary. His cook had developed a boil on his back, which was festering seriously and was quite painful. I could have done nothing. This was, after all, the huge city of Shanghai, not remote Yuehu, and as long as one was willing to pay a little bit, there were plenty of hospitals where one could be treated. But my scalpel became impatient. It protested loudly from my medical supply box, so I had no choice but to perform a resection for the cook. My lancet was not on its best behavior that day. It was the first and the last time there was any conflict between us. In a fit of anger, it bit through my rubber glove and made a small cut on my index finger. The operation was a great success, and the cook’s pain was immediately relieved. My own wound was very small, with almost no bleeding. It seemed harmless. I disinfected it, and the next day I boarded the Jefferson.

  By that evening, the wound had become infected, and my finger swelled to the size of a radish. I took the sulfonamide I had with me, but to no effect. I wasn’t aware that I was allergic to this drug or that newer antibiotics had been developed in Europe and America. After all, my own medical knowledge hadn’t been updated for many years. I went from bad to worse. There was so much pus in my wound, it filled a teacup. The ship, sailing on open sea, was several days away from the nearest port. The doctor aboard suggested removing the finger surgically at once. Not realizing the urgency of the situation, I hesitated. The reason for my hesitation was quite simply that I couldn’t live without this finger in the future. Before I had left on my voyage to America, I had given some thought to my plans once I returned to China. I would set up a clinic with a simple operating table and a ward in another village so that the people from neighboring towns would not have to travel hundreds of li over mountain paths to the county seat for things like traumatic infection or childbirth. What prompted me to devise this plan was not merely the plight of local people. Within these otherwise noble principles was, in fact, hidden a bit of selfishness. It was for another person—a young Chinese woman who held an important place in my heart.