by Lucy Tan
Lina and Wei had spent more than twenty years wondering where Qiang was and what he’d been doing, but now that she had the information, she could not make sense of it. Underground factions, gambling halls, paying off cops—it all sounded like a pitch for a crime movie.
“You couldn’t have let us know? Sent some kind of word that you were okay?”
“Send word back to my family that I was involved in a gang? Yeah, that really would have put them at ease.” How petulant he sounded. This was not a side of Qiang that Lina had ever seen before. Wei had told her about the spats Qiang had gotten into with their father, but she had never quite been able to imagine them until now.
“We’re not stupid. We knew what you were doing, what you were involved in. Maybe not the specifics, but we knew you were part of black society. We thought you might have been dead. Even when you were years gone, Wei would wake up sometimes in the night, and he’d turn over, and his expression—I knew he was thinking about you. I could tell.”
“I know you both think badly of me, okay? I know. That’s because I am bad. I misled you, I hurt my family…I was wrong. I own up to it.”
His words came out in a rush, so different from the usual unhurried quality of his speech. She could tell that saying them had afforded him some relief. How disgusting. What good was admitting you were wrong when there was nothing to be done about it and the only thing left to be had was forgiveness?
And yet, so much of what she loved about Qiang was his willingness to be wrong. Wei was never wrong. Every moment in her husband’s life was anticipated and optimized. He prided himself on his control over his surroundings, whereas Qiang seemed desperate for his surroundings to effect some change on him. Wei would never have put himself in a position to say I wish I had ended up with you. Wei was the type of man who would have made it happen.
“What was America like?” Qiang asked.
The want in his voice was so clear. Wasn’t it natural for him to have spent years wondering about them too? The word that came to mind when she thought about life with Wei was grounded. Against all odds, the two of them had been able to establish roots on the other side of the world. But Lina knew that wasn’t what Qiang was asking. He wanted to know whether she had come to love Wei after all. Do you think you’ll be happy with him?
“It was happy,” she finally said. A lump rose in her throat. “A solid, steady kind of happy—the sort of happy nobody talks about because they don’t think about it unless they’re asked.”
“Well,” he replied after a moment, “it’s a good thing I asked.”
Even though she couldn’t see him, she could imagine his posture exactly, the way his arms were looped loosely around his knees and the heavy drop of his head.
“I think we should talk about it,” Qiang said suddenly. “How I never fulfilled my end of the bargain.”
She wished she could see his face. She’d waited so long to have this conversation, and she felt robbed of the sight of him.
“I regret leaving Suzhou. I came here to tell both of you that I was wrong for leaving. But I don’t regret not telling my father about us like I said I would. That would have been the worst way to betray our families.”
Ba, let me walk with you, she had said the morning of the wedding. I have something to say. She had knowingly let her father down, and she had done it for Qiang. It was one of the last times she would see him.
“All you ever did was cause your family pain. You think marrying me would have been the worst thing you could have done? You’ve always made the selfish, impulsive choice. So why the sudden moral high ground? Why is it that when it came to the two of us, you suddenly developed a conscience?”
He exhaled as though he had been holding his breath, waiting for her to ask just that question. But when he answered, all he said was “It was never supposed to be me.”
So, silence—Qiang’s favorite card to play. The image in her mind had only grown clearer with time: young Qiang lying beside the lake, turning his body so that all she could see was the damp gleam of his ribs, the wet, crumpled fabric on his hips. By his boot, a small curved knife. Why do you have that? He’d paused then as he paused now, deciding how much of himself to reveal. It was always on his terms, this opacity. She hated that she still felt such a need for his answers. She didn’t want to need him at all.
But now there was no denying that silence was the weaker move. He knew this. She hoped he also knew how despicable she had come to find him, how lacking. He had to answer.
“If I’m going to tell this story,” he finally said, “I have to start from the very beginning. What do you say to another drink?”
She’d say he was stalling. But the truth was, she felt she ought to prepare herself too.
“All right,” she answered.
Lina heard his footsteps approaching, and then Qiang’s hand appeared out of the darkness. Lina allowed herself to be helped to a standing position. Together they walked the perimeter of the cathedral, arms outstretched to feel for the wall of seeds, searching for the way back downstairs. The red light of the VIP lounge was a shock to her retinas, and they both squinted as they reentered the room. On Lina’s way to the couch, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored walls and was ashamed of the thin tunic she wore. It was cut too closely to her body. How desperately she played at youth.
Qiang had approached the bar as solemnly as he would an operating table. She watched as he poured each drink carefully and brought them over to the couch.
“Hao de,” he said. “Here goes.”
22
It begins the way many stories begin: A young man leaves home. He is twenty-two, a professor of chemistry, his glasses flimsy, hair cropped close to his head. Like many other intellectuals of the time, he has been singled out by the party as one who could use reeducating, and so he has left his young wife and newborn child behind in Suzhou. With him is a canvas bag filled with the barest of essentials: linen pants, twill work shirts, heavy winter clothing, and an extra blanket. He boards a train bound west and notes that he is the only one who looks out of place at the cadre school, the only one who has brought a book with him. In three months, he will find the pages of his book missing. By then it will not occur to him to ask who has used it for kindling. The tenets of group living will have become as mindless to him as the first steps he takes in the morning—from his hay mattress to the coal stove to the outhouse at the back of the grounds. Come winter, he will be the one to remove the cover of the book and wedge it into a chink in the window, an effort to keep in heat.
It wasn’t an easy transition for Fang, this countryside life. Never before had he carried wood on his back, slept in a room with twenty other men, or studied socialist thought until the words beat against his dreams. Never had he seen a dead woman dragged out of the dormitory by her feet. Illness, the dormitory leader said when asked for the woman’s cause of death. But she was fine yesterday! someone shouted. No. The dorm leader tapped her temple. Not the kind of illness you can see.
There were terrors that Fang Lijian could not begin to understand. What he did know was that thinking was going to get him in trouble, any way you looked at it. Say your thoughts out loud and you’d be punished by the government. Keep them to yourself and they’d kill you from the inside. He resolved to think as little as possible and to focus on the tasks he was given.
At the end of six months, Fang Lijian felt as if he had lived half his life in the countryside. He was surprised to find that he didn’t mind the work itself, even liked the way his muscles had risen into sluglike shapes along his back, the smell of smoked tea leaves, and the novelty of this community and their sun-driven routines. It was simpler, more primal. He had almost forgotten he was there against his will. What you learn here, the camp leader said, is all you will ever need to know. The hunger for information, which had once led him to become an academic, was now fed by the stories of the other men. Fang Lijian liked listening to the farmhands talk, though he said little himself.
He was particularly taken by a man named Zhen Hong. Earnest and outgoing, Zhen Hong could spend the entire afternoon telling the rest of them about their country—tales of hard work, camaraderie, and nationhood, all featuring common and capable men of the cause.
Fang was no stranger to revolutionary fervor. He had grown up in the fifties, after all. He had memorized the necessary slogans, performed the necessary self-criticisms. Knew that in the eyes of the government, his mind did not belong to him. And yet, in Shanghai, he had been privileged. He had an office in which to hide and did not see the violence of the land reforms in the countryside. Government, to him, meant paranoid men in uniform waving around written directives in an effort to suppress feudalist ideals.
During those afternoons in the fields, Zhen Hong created a different perspective. He spoke about public good, about how every man in China had a place in effecting it. He wanted to help the CCP protect the country in a way that their ancestors had not been able to. We can’t be the country other countries stomp all over anymore, he said. We’ve got to get healthy as a nation. Pull ourselves together, centralize. Maybe not every program or campaign has proven successful, but think of the greater good: We have a system in place. We have grounds for improvement.
Aside from being a cadre-school director, Zhen had also been a district leader during the Great Leap Forward, and the campaign’s failure had intensified the humility and seriousness to which he was already predisposed. This was the part of him that Fang responded to most, for it was the part that existed in himself. Their differences in background and demeanor only made their commonalities stand out, and although Fang didn’t say much in the fields (he was a slow worker and privately believed that this afforded him less right to speak), Zhen Hong saw it too. They grew close. After sundown, Fang was in the habit of stopping by Zhen’s home to pass the time in conversation or a game of Go. When he looked in on Zhen and his wife, they seemed to him like the future incarnate. If only all of China was made of such hope and drive! Zhen Hong had never been properly educated, and yet he was the smartest man Fang knew. There had to be some validity to the CCP’s methods—reeducation, it seemed to him, actually worked.
The days were like a single note played over and over again, but because they were so similar, they blended into one comforting hum. That was how, in the countryside, time could stretch and shrink at once. Everything was shared in the labor camp, and soon the stories of their families back home became communal too. Every man there had someone he had left behind. Bent over fieldwork, their faces reflecting the luminous green of the tea leaves they harvested, they told stories that rose to the same tone and pitch. Their sentiments evened out. Marital indifference and resentments disappeared for some, and for the lucky few who had it good back home, something was lost in the telling of their wives and children. Their memories lost sharpness. The idea of missing became bigger than the missing itself. Aside from the weekly letters that Fang Lijian received from his wife (updates on the baby, news of the neighborhood gossip), his family was excluded from the world of the tea farm. His thoughts of them became what he reached for rather than what reached for him.
A young woman came into Fang’s range of vision so subtly he didn’t know he was looking at her until he couldn’t look away. Her name was Yuzi. She had full cheeks that ended in a sharp little chin. She wore her hair in two braids at the top of her head and worked with quick hands and had an even quicker tongue. Yuzi had a child who was just a few months old at the time, barely a bulge of a boy strapped to her back in the Yunnan heat. Because of the way she wore her hair, from a distance mother and son looked like an ant carrying its cargo between the rows of tea bushes. As the story went, Yuzi’s husband had been a government official on his way out of Mao’s favor. Two weeks before Fang’s arrival, he had disappeared. No one knew for sure where he’d gone, but most guessed he’d escaped to Macao.
By the time Fang Lijian got to the tea farm, Yuzi had already won the compassion of the other cadre-school members, and it was only natural for Fang to feel tender toward her too. He found himself dishing out extra pork for the infant during mealtimes and then lingering to watch the boy’s mother chew it up and transfer it, bit by bit, into her son’s mouth. Unlike the rest of the workers, Fang Lijian was mesmerized not by the woman’s misfortune, but by the woman herself.
The more time they spent together, the more the rest of the community began to look in the opposite direction. It was out of politeness, not disapproval. They were relieved that someone was taking care of her. They must have known that Fang was married, but this was during a time when none of them knew what the country had in store for them. Some of their loved ones had been sent to labor camps worse than theirs, and many of them had disappeared, never to be heard from again. The rules by which they’d lived their old lives seemed too distant from the lives they lived now.
Fang allowed this new, rusticated version of himself to grow close to Yuzi—in the fields, at meals, and, eventually, at night among the tea plants, where they lay naked together, their bodies against the cool earth. He felt as though he were drowning, and every morning he woke thinking about her, the line between dreaming and waking so thin he could still feel her skin against his. He smelled the scent of her on his skin all day; imagined or real, he could not be sure. He couldn’t escape her. For a time, he felt there must be something wrong with him. This feeling wasn’t love, because he’d felt love before. He loved his wife, and he loved his daughter. What he felt for Yuzi could only be described as a sickness.
Fang Lijian looked forward to winter, when the harvesting would come to a close and he could spend as much time as possible with Yuzi. He pictured them taking the baby for a walk through the rows of tea leaves, the sky low and thick with clouds. But that winter, Yuzi developed a cough that bloomed into tuberculosis. They moved her to a hut by herself, and she insisted that the baby stay with Fang Lijian while she recovered.
Spending time away from Yuzi created the space Fang needed to see the situation in a more objective manner. Now when he looked into the boy’s eyes, he no longer saw just Yuzi’s features. What he saw in front of him—in his round eyes, in the uncertain wave of his arms—was vulnerability in its purest form. It reminded him of his own family, the wife and daughter he had left in Shanghai. In that respect, he was not so different from Yuzi’s runaway husband. In that respect, maybe he was worse. When Zhen Hong came by to check on his friend and his friend’s young charge, he could see multiple strains of desperation on Fang’s face: his fear and love for Yuzi, the shock of being responsible for the baby, and the guilt of having betrayed his own family.
Meanwhile, Yuzi’s health worsened. The blood she coughed up could no longer be contained in the rags that, despite constantly being washed and wrung out, would not lose their metallic smell. During nights at home with the baby, Fang Lijian set about hammering an old tin basin into a bean-shaped receptacle to fit around Yuzi’s neck. This way, the fluid could be emptied, quickly and cleanly, into a pit in the courtyard and covered up by dirt.
As Yuzi worsened, she began to grow desperate and slowly lose control of her mind. She asked after her son constantly and fell silent only when she heard the sound of children’s feet or their shouts coming through the cracks in the window. Then she would lift her head to look outside—imagining, perhaps, her son’s future passing her by.
She died on the day of the first frost. The camp leader had her buried in an unused plot of land a forty-minute walk from where the tea bushes grew. It was far enough, they calculated, that there would be no way for the sickness to contaminate the crops. Fang Lijian refused Zhen Hong’s offers to help carry the boy to the burial ground. He kept his arm folded under Yuzi’s son’s bottom and his other hand on his back as they made the funeral march. The two were chest to chest, and Fang could feel the little boy’s heart beating against his own, his short fingers closing tighter around the back of his neck as they went. Along the way, Fang Lijian began to cry, but after
days of crying for Yuzi, his tears were no longer for her. Now he was crying for himself. He was crying for the heart of his young wife and the ridicule they’d face when he brought home someone else’s son. In the final days before Yuzi’s death, Fang had acted on impulse: he had promised her he would look after the boy, raise him until he could go out on his own.
Unlike Fang Lijian, Zhen Hong had foreseen this difficult situation. He knew that Yuzi would ask Fang and that Fang would not be able to say no. Zhen Hong and his wife were protective of Fang. Never had they imagined they would see a chemistry professor working in the fields, and they viewed him as a physical embodiment of the progress the nation was making. But as much as he supported the idea of equality, Zhen Hong could never see Fang as a true equal. No matter how much time he spent in the fields, Fang could not rid himself of the delicate motion of his wrists as he picked the tea leaves. His eyes still had that strained quality whenever he tried to look farther than middle distance. The Zhens could not bear the thought of Fang bringing home the child; they feared it would ruin his life. Sometime during Yuzi’s quarantine, the couple had come to a decision. Now, as the funeral procession neared that unused plot of land, Zhen Hong introduced the idea.
“Fang Lijian,” he said. “Give the child to me. Menghua and I will raise him as our own.”
Fang stared at Zhen until the words sank in, and then he lowered his head.
“Don’t joke around.”
“I’m not joking. I mean it.”
“This has nothing to do with you.”
“Brother, stop a moment.” Zhen put a hand on his friend’s arm and they stepped to the side of the road, letting the procession move on past them.