by Lily Pond
All these angels have migrated—in a split second??—from the Middle East. They are not quite acquainted with the xian, feathered folk much like them, yet much unlike them. And yet they know they are all there for the same purpose. This is a holy time.
Liang Xueping has her skirt. She has found it at a small store some distance down Wang Fu Jing Street. It is a zebra print, orange and brown, and it swirls about her as she dances in front of the flyblown mirror in the store. The mirror distorts her. Her face seems pear-shaped, her dimple has moved over near her ear, and her hips are a well-fed American’s. But she has found her skirt.
She will spend the weekend with a friend in the Mo Shi Di section of town. Her friend works for a company owned by premier Li Peng’s son. Her friend has no politics. Almost no one in China has any politics. Liang Xueping thinks the only thing she can remember about why she married her husband is that he has brave politics, that he is an idealist. Still, he is not very clever in bed.
In the night, June third, the adrenaline and the hallucinogens kick in. All of the thin soldiers with baby faces are loosed on the students. The dying begins and proceeds.
Everywhere in China, it has been this way since the Cultural Revolution: at all hours of the day, voices come at everyone from bullhorns high on posts. Everyone ignores all of it. In the morning, the polyglot national anthem is followed by news. A woman’s voice reads, then a man’s voice. The news is misshapen, and no one believes it.
Now, on the third of June, in the night students have commandeered the central sound system. Over the bullhorns in central Beijing comes something no one can ignore: the moans of the dying, a screamed and hysterical commentary, voices crying to heaven for pity, for mercy, for just one small fraction of one percent of the things they had hoped for, these two months of beautiful and peaceful sit-in.
The dark sky is lit with the red flames of army trucks burning, a flickering hell. On the sidewalks outside the Beijing Hotel, foreigners stand transfixed by the bullhorns, wondering what they have walked into, what world.
Sunday morning, June fourth, Julia and Martin wake early. Their hotel has green carpet that Martin says the Chinese got from a Goofy Golf course outside Cleveland, on the same expedition as the exhumation of the porn theater’s poly-silk cashier.
Their room has thin cotton curtains printed with flying cranes, emblematizing longevity. They are black and white, and between their eyes there is a mystical red jewel-like marking. The cranes defy gravity. A slight breeze riffles the curtains.
Julia lies with her back against Martin’s. She moves her bottom against his. She thinks of the nuns from her high school, who would never have imagined her here, teaching the heathen and loving this heathen man. She speaks to her guardian angel, a habit she carries from childhood.
“I am perfectly happy,” she says. She thinks she should add something, complete the prayer. All she can think of is more of the same. “I am perfectly happy,” she says again. “Amen,” she says. This is a prayer of thanksgiving.
She turns over and slides against Martin, and Martin slides out of sleep, ready, and into her. She smells his breath on her cheek. He has a smell of fresh yeast, and sugar, and spring wind. She lifts, with the cranes, and she thinks of Xueping on the train, telling her she stood outside their door, listening, and she hears her own voice, rising in a chant, calling out Martin’s name, rising.
She remembers—a flash, like the light of a fist-pearl reflecting off foil—that Chinese legend says cranes live six hundred years, at which time they cease eating and only drink. She thinks she could live without eating or drinking: just this, and with Martin. The immortals who do not have wings ride cranes. She is an angel, a crane, an immortal. Her voice disappears into the sky and the fist-pearl is back of her eyes, pulsing.
She is washing her hair in the cracked and inadequate bathtub. The Chinese shampoo is an extraterrestrial shimmering green and so thin her long hair uses near half a bottle. She rinses and steps from the tub. She steps to the window, toweling her hair, breathing in the cool morning, the crane curtains flapping. Outside, all seems calm except that there is a sound of strange keening wafting up from the dusty grey labyrinth of tiled roofs in the courtyard below.
Suddenly, Martin, who has been sitting hunched over the radio—Voice of America—across the room, bolts upright. “Jul!” he says. “Bloodbath!” He turns up the volume. Not five miles away, at the Square, while they slept, the poor ignorant soldiers, the soldiers crazed on their trick “immunizations,” unleashed massive fire on the students. There is no word as to how many are killed. In Julia’s mind’s eye, the world fills, like this hotel’s cracked discolored porcelain tub, with a bath of blood.
“Oh, Martin,” she says. It is all she can say. She puts her wet head into his lap. He leans over her, the weight of his head and his chest all that holds her to the earth. She feels she might rise, like a crane freed, if he were not there, and in her grief rupture the skin of the sky, and keep rising.
In the Mo Shi Di, Liang Xueping and her friend crouch in the inmost corner of the fifth-floor apartment. Outside there is rifle fire. This section of the city is under siege. They have heard a shrill woman’s voice in the hall—plastic sandal-soles flapping first, then the voice—crying that on the first two floors of the building, shots have penetrated the windows, and seven people lie dead. “How high can bullets fly?” says her friend. Xueping does not know. She opens her palms to the ceiling in helplessness; she widens her eyes in not-knowing.
Later that day, her friend falls asleep on the floor where she has been crouching. Xueping sees her chance and creeps out. She wants to see what really is happening. She catfoots down the stairs to ground level and slides around the door into the street. An old woman is coming down the alley pushing a child in a wheelbarrow, spread back, arms and legs out like the points of a limp little star. The child is a girl—her granddaughter, no doubt. In the center of her forehead—like the crane’s jewel—a single red hole. “See. What. They did,” chants the woman. “See. What. They did.”
Xueping turns and goes inside again. One hundred seventy miles away her husband, frantic for her return, does all he can do: he writes a speech, born of his grief and his fear for her safety, that he will read at the college’s protest tonight, on the library steps. Smoky torches will burn. There will be banners, red characters painted on pink bed-sheets and strung onto poles. The secret police will be there. They will pick him up, Xueping’s grieving husband, and he will be in a prison cell for six months.
Even there, at the prison, are angels. They hover in the dark recesses of cells, they catch in the corner of the eye like cobwebs. They are waiting for all of the prisoners who will be needing them.
Above the head of the red-jeweled granddaughter, an angel hovers. He has great muscular wings, like a wild hawk’s. It is Phanuel, Angel of Hope. Xueping, standing half-hidden at the corner of the building, blinded by grief for the girl and the old woman, cannot see him. In the Mo Shi Di apartment of the friend without politics, angels like hummingbirds, angels like wheels, hover at ceiling-fan height. The friend, her head on a flat towel folded on the hard floor, sleeps on.
Tuesday morning they must be at the airport. The Embassy has ordered out all Americans. Martin must take care of some business for them all, and he is resourceful. He goes off on his own and will meet them there. Julia touches his cheek as he leaves with a sense of great fear. Yes, he is resourceful, but Beijing is full of black holes today.
Mrs. Ellen—who has had a room at the same Goofy Golf hotel—and Julia hire a bicycle cart and clutch tight to the plywood cargo platform as the driver careens through back alleys. He explains his route. “Bu … bu … bu …” he says. He means No, no, no … Then he pantomimes shooting a gun. like a cowboy. No what? No bullets. Ah, yes. He is taking the no-bullet route.
Nonetheless, all the way they hear shooting. On sidewalks, they see young people with bandage-wrapped heads. The popsicle vendors are out, wanting to dispense pop
sicles, as if they were a balm. No one is buying. The vendors are giving their wares away now. Mrs. Ellen and Julia look at each other, wishing they might stop and have one ceremonial popsicle, pale, bland, and giving off ice-steam into the day’s shimmering heat, a kind of communion, a healing. They are already homesick for China. They want not to leave.
At the airport there are whole families from the Middle East, squatting and chasing their children and eating odd candies and nuts. In the distance, the sound of odd bullets. High overhead, angels.
A young American approaches Julia. He is carrying a yellow plastic container. He says he is a courier from CBS and he has footage from the square which has to go to Tokyo. Will Julia carry it? Mrs. Ellen grabs Julia’s arm.
“Drugs,” she says. “That man is trying to get you to smuggle drugs. That’s how they do it.”
Julia smiles no thanks to the young man. He persuades someone else to do the job for him. When they arrive in the Tokyo airport, Julia will see a man with a sign that says CBS, and the gentleman carrying the yellow canister will pass it along.
“Proves nothing,” says Mrs. Ellen.
But still in Beijing, the time for their departure approaches. Martin is nowhere. Julia twists the cloth of her blouse at her throat. “Tsk,” Mrs. Ellen says. “He’ll get here.”
Their flight is called.
“Come on,” Mrs. Ellen says. “He’ll come dancing up, last minute, everything organized. Ducks in a row. Come on.”
The plane has a spiral staircase and a bar with pink mirrors.
Julia loses a button to her twisting.
“He’ll come,” Mrs. Ellen says. “Dancing.”
There seem to be no angels on the plane.
The engines rev up, and the plane begins taxiing. Julia is crying and wishing that she had a big looping rosary that she might finger for comfort as they take off. The plane rises.
One year later, Mrs. Ellen is back in China, teaching on another one-year contract at another university. She walks in Tian-An-Men Square, energetically in her ugly shoes, and she thinks she feels ghosts hovering. She does not know about angels. The Square is enormous. The air is thin. Mao keeps on smiling, over the gate to the Forbidden City, his face a benign giant peach.
She writes to Julia, in response to a letter, “Yes, we can teach Thoreau, as we used to. ‘Civil Disobedience,’ even. Just as long as we don’t say, ‘You see the direct application to your situation here under Deng?’ You know the Chinese mind, Julia.”
Each time Mrs. Ellen opens her Thoreau, angels spring forth, like good moths and butterflies. Some grow. They bump on the ceilings of the classroom, knock against the smeary windows. Students look up from their books at the odd sound, then look back again to their reading, uncertain of what they heard.
In Hills, Iowa, flat as a plate, is is Saturday night. Julia takes her three-month-old daughter, the fruit of that last bloody morning, to the roped-off place in the street where a local band readies to play. They are called Dogs on Skis, and the locals are sure they will make it big. Julia’s baby has been a miracle in the dark aftermath of the evacuation. Martin has never been heard from again. Finding Americans lost in the People’s Republic is not high on the federal agenda.
Julia dreams of him every night, spotty dreams that wake her shivering, sweating. She has evolved dozens of explanations for his disappearance and none of them fits. But he must be alive. The whole universe wants it. Crossing a tiny bridge outside town one day on foot, she thinks of the day Martin told the tale of Zhu Que Bridge and the UFO. She thinks: one hundred years ago, 1890, exactly. A trickle of creek-water catches the sunlight and dazzles her eyes for a moment. Perhaps the flash makes her eyes water. She certainly cannot be crying.
She thinks of a poem that she memorized in her freshman year in high school: it speaks of “a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me.” She gropes for the name. Ah, yes: Annabel Lee, rhymes with “me.” She is certain that seraphs do not covet. She closes her eyes, a long eye-cooling blink, and prays, asks them to guard him and bring him home safe. Mrs. Ellen, back at the college in the capital of the province, keeps watch, asks everyone she meets for possible leads.
Dogs on Skis play now. Julia will not ask them to play the Fleetwood Mac, though she is hearing it in her head. The baby girl—Jamie—asleep in Julia’s arms—startles at the first loud chords. Her clenched sleep-fists unclutch and grab out at the air. Julia fingers her smooth tiny cheek, where a dimple forms up that is not unlike Xueping’s. The smoothness of her child’s skin reminds Julia of Martin’s, that very last morning: the feeling of angels’ wings.
Shi Lu & the Dairy Accountant
Li Bao Li
oN THE FIRST DAY that I went to Shanghai, I found it necessary to take a bus. I have never been on a bus before and I clearly was uncertain if it was healthy for me to go with all those people, most of whom looked more like the chickens in my barnyard than they did like people, but I felt there are things more important than considerations like that, such as getting to my destination, so I climbed aboard.
I looked around. Now everyone looked like Chairman Mao—funny to go from a chicken to a pig simply in the act of sitting down, but there you are. I wished I had a package to carry in my arms or something to hang on to. I felt quite useless with my arms hanging at my sides like this. I looked around me. It was very hot and dusty in the city. How can anyone be happy here, I wondered. In fact, maybe nobody was. I didn’t see anyone who looked happy. Maybe there is a rule about happiness on busses. Maybe there is a rule about happiness in any public place at all! Maybe there is just a rule about happiness!
One man looked very particularly the most unhappy of all. His eyebrows, bushy to begin with, came to a point right above his nose. What an effort it must be to bring one’s eyebrows together like that. A scowl like that takes a great deal of practice, I would think. In my province we have no mirrors. Well, some have parts of mirrors they may have found along the way, but I would think it would take a big mirror to practice that kind of face-making.
Suddenly it occurs to me that he is staring right at me, scowling at me. Why he would be doing this, I have no idea. Still, I have no time for considerations like these. There is someone I must find. When the bus comes to the next stop, it is time for me to get off. I feel the hot dust on the back of my neck. The bus smells terrible when it pulls away. As I begin to walk down the street to the Province offices, I realize that the scowling man got off the bus at the same time I did and in fact is following me down the street. I wonder if he is actually a guard and this is what happens to all strangers in the city. There is nothing wrong with that, I assume. Good for the protection of us all. Still, it makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Maybe everything good for you makes you uncomfortable. I think there is a Mao saying that says something like that. Maybe even if there isn’t there should be.
I have gone over a hundred times with the head of my village how to get where I am going, but I cannot seem to get there. Every street is I think ten times longer than it shows on the map I was shown. Perhaps I am simply remembering incorrectly. It would not be the first time. I am always trying to do my best, but always they tell me that I forget half of what I’m told and end up doing wrong after all. Why they chose me to go on the excursion, I have no idea, but they said I would be the perfect one.
I think back to last night, when the moon was full and the air damp with dew and crickets. How little I wanted to go, but it was my duty, I was told. It was my mission alone, and no one else could do it like I could. That’s what they told me. I looked around fondly, and everyone seemed to have such hope in their eyes, I had to go. I had to come here for them. It would be good and honorable, I knew that. Still, I wonder. …
I look around me and notice that I am the only woman I see that has not cut her hair. In my village, still everyone has long plaits done up and out of the way, of course. It still isn’t done, to cut the hair on a woman. It would put a status on her, almost unclean, I thi
nk. It certainly is not the fashion. But here, the fashion is different. I wonder if that is why old scowl-eyes is following me. Maybe it is a rule that you cannot appear in the city looking like one from the country. Maybe he is going to arrest me and have me taken to a detention where I will never see anyone in my village again. My heart beats more quickly, and I am quite concerned that I cannot yet find my building where I am going.
My feet are getting a little tired, I don’t know why. I am used to walking great distances, but usually I am walking on dirt roads, not on pavement like this. I guess that pavement make the feet tired more quickly. When I come to a row of benches under some trees I decide to sit down for a little while. I wish I had a bicycle like so many others, but I don’t have one and that’s simply the way it is.
The man with the scowly eyebrows walks past me and then sits on a bench far at the other end of the row of benches. It is very difficult for me not to look at him. It drives me crazy, in fact, because I am suddenly so filled with curiosity. I can be a very curious person, I know. They tell me this at home. I don’t see why this is exactly a personal flaw, curiosity. But in a girl it is wrong. This is what they always tell me. Sometimes I wish I understood everything they tell me, but I think that will never happen.
When my feet feel well rested, I decide to start walking again. Surely it can’t be that far anymore, plus I’m getting very hungry all of a sudden. I have money for food, and I hope I can find somewhere that looks healthy to eat before too long. Of course the man gets up too and comes along behind me. I suddenly want to swirl around and catch him staring after me, but I am afraid this would be against the rules, because I really don’t know them in the city, and I really don’t want to be in any greater trouble than I am.