by Song Ying
“That’s Lan’que Ridge,” their guide said as he pointed to the sugarcane, greatly surprising Nie and the taxi driver, who saw only what appeared to be an impenetrable stand of sugarcane. But before they could say anything, the old man parted the sugarcane and ducked in, climbing ahead of them up the hill. Nie felt the leaves cut his face and arms, but fortunately a dozen meters or so later they were free of assault from the leaves. Before them was a deserted plot overgrown with waist-high weeds.
“Right here,” the old man said. Rocks protruded through the undergrowth.
Nie parted the weeds in front of him, revealing a headstone with a still-legible inscription, HERE LIES COMRADE WAN XIAORONG. He continued on and exposed a light rusty-red stone with a newly painted inscription, HERE LIES COMRADE ZHONG XING, to the right of which was a line of text about the girl and the time of her death. A red five-pointed star was carved in the top of the tombstone, and traces of burned paper were still visible on the small stone slab in front of the tomb. Headstones for the other girls were visible nearby.
Nie Feng stood still, besieged by a turbulence of emotions.
On his way over, he’d tried to envision what it would feel like to see the graves. Would he be standing silently under a bloodred setting sun? Or shrouded in a drizzle as rain wet his face? He hadn’t expected the ten girls’ graves to be overrun by weeds, brambles, couch grass, and other nameless vegetation.
Nie sought out all ten graves and stood before each of them, bowing silently as a sign of respect.
The weed-infested field fronted a grove of apricot trees, whose blooming season was long past. As he gazed at nothing in particular, he thought he heard the melodious harmonica strains of the sorrowful “Apricot in the Rain” coming to him out of the distant past.
Looking up at the relentless ball of fire, he discovered that all ten headstones faced northeast—the direction of their hometown, Chengdu. That might well have been the final wish of the ten girls sleeping under the ground.
After quietly taking a few pictures, he experienced a sudden attack of dizziness. He hadn’t eaten all day and the tough climb under a blazing sun, plus the emotional encounter with the past, made him so weak he had to sit down on the grass, ignoring the old man’s warning against leeches.
When former zhiqing returned to visit the site, the old man explained, they first contacted the farm, which gave them a chance to clear the grass and tidy up the area. But Nie’s unannounced visit had made it impossible for the farmworkers to do anything, so he was seeing the area in its natural state.
Ten youthful souls rested quietly under weeds on a deserted mountain. Nie had the eerie feeling that when he parted the grass it was like parting their hair to reveal their young faces frozen in stone. They’d been so young, no more than sixteen or seventeen. Like delicate March apricot flowers falling to the ground in the rain, their lives had ended before they’d had a chance to bloom. In modern cities, girls that age were pampered in their families and in society. They ate at McDonald’s, wore Nike shoes, idolized the cool-looking Jay Chou, went crazy over “Little Swallow” in the TV drama about a Qing princess, chatted away with their online Prince Charming.… They would never learn the sad stories of these girls, who had been their age so many years before.
Just listen to the childish voices of the young visitors to the blue curtain:
I saw the exhibit; I can’t forget the forest of green, green rubber trees and red, red coffee beans.
My parents were zhiqing and I envy them their youthful days.
Nie felt himself tearing up, so he got to his feet. Behind him only a few of the rubber trees planted by the zhiqing many years before were left. Slits on the trunks released a milky, glue-like substance that flowed into a rubber bowl underneath.
“We only get a third of the rubber we used to get,” the old man said.
It was almost as if, after bleeding for twenty-eight years, the trees were drying up.
— 4 —
Nie Feng and the taxi driver followed the old man to his house, a structure with thatched rooms in front and brick rooms in the back to rest. They sat at a table in the thatched front, and as Nie talked with the old man about the 2nd Company zhiqing, his wife, a friendly woman with graying hair, prepared some local tea for them. After being sautéed in an iron wok, it tasted like Iron Buddha tea.
Their guide offered to look up Old Fu. “He’s not in,” he said when he returned.
“I saw him a while ago,” his wife said.
As the only staff worker who’d been at the scene of the fire, Fu would prove to be an important witness, so the woman went to find him, but she returned with the same message.
Nie was wondering where Old Fu might be when a heavyset old woman stormed in.
“They’ve already conducted an investigation, haven’t they? So why do it again?” she complained loudly.
She was wearing a sleeveless blouse; a pair of gold earrings dangled from her ears. She was, it turned out, Old Fu’s wife, and had also been a worker at the farm. Nie told her about his magazine and his visit, explaining that he just wanted to hear about what happened from Old Fu, and that it was not a renewed investigation. She explained that four of the eight huts had already caught fire when she heard the alarm, but she was busy taking care of her own children. Nie wondered about the rumor that an old staff worker saw blue flames, probably from burning fat. Mrs. Fu neither confirmed nor denied the rumor.
“That was Old Dong,” she said, “and he’s dead.”
Nie then brought up the other key element: after the fire was out, someone noticed that the bamboo door to the third hut had been sealed with wire, which was, they realized, why the girls had not been able to escape. Old Mrs. Fu did not deny that either. “It was like this door,” she said as she pointed to the bamboo door in the thatched room. It, too, was secured by a coil of thick wire.
When the driver asked about the bodies, Old Mrs. Fu looked pained and made a tiny gesture. “They were shrunken.”
At Nie’s request, the old man and Mrs. Fu took him to the fire site, on a slope not far from where they’d been. It was a weedy plot of land slightly over a hundred square meters. A brick house with a tiled roof on the top of the slope was where Fu and his wife lived. They told him that no one had thought of building on this spot over the past three decades.
Nie had trouble sorting out his feelings as he took some pictures. He was reluctant to say good-bye; so were the old villagers. He was given a packet of tea as a souvenir.
When they neared the big green tree on their way downhill, they spotted an old man squatting beneath it. Wearing a gray shirt, he had a weatherworn face.
“You must be the reporter.” He was smoking a cigarette.
“Yes, and you must be Old Fu.” Nie could not believe his luck.
“My old lady didn’t want me interviewed,” Old Fu said with a smile. He’d obviously been waiting for Nie. So Nie sat down next to the old worker from the Construction Corps.
He’d been on site all night, helping to put out the fire and saving anything he could. Nie sought out every detail, no matter how insignificant it appeared.
In the end, Nie was able to confirm what he’d read: After the third hut, where Zhong Xing and the other nine girls were sleeping, burned to the ground, the survivors found a latch made of coiled wire. When Old Fu helped with the bodies, eight of them were huddled together, while the other two lay by the door, where they had obviously tried, but failed, to open it. The height and body types showed that they were Zhong Xing and Wan Xiaorong. One of the surviving girls told them about Wan Xiaorong’s facial moles, and that on the train ride to Lanjiang, she’d said to Xia Yuhong, “I got rid of all but this mole between my brows. It points the direction of my future.” It had not helped her avoid the tragedy.
Old Fu also told Nie that more than two hours before the fire, he’d heard someone knocking on the door of a hut down below. He was asking Zhong Xing to come out and talk to him, which created a commotion insid
e the hut; the girls quickly locked their door. Fu even heard the girls’ panicky shouts of “It’s Grinning Tyrant.” Fu had stuck his head out the window and, in the dusky light, seen a stocky figure that resembled their company commander.
“Shit!” The man had cursed hoarsely at the locked door and stormed away.
What an incredible find for Nie Feng. He took a copy of Western Sunshine from his tote bag and showed it to Old Fu. A close-up shot of Hu Guohao was on the cover.
“It does look like him, especially the nose and those ratlike beady eyes.” Old Fu snubbed out his cigarette.
Nie then showed him another photo, a faded one from a newspaper in Hainan; Hu was wearing a sport coat.
“That’s him. The Company Commander, Hu Zihao.”
“His name is Hu Zihao?” That came as a shock. So Hu Guohao was in reality Hu Zihao, Commander of the 2nd Company.
Nie asked why some people said they hadn’t known about the wire on the door.
“Commander Hu wouldn’t let us say so.”
“Why?”
“He was the local overlord; the zhiqing kids all called him Grinning Tyrant.”
The old man told Nie all about Hu’s evil deeds. He was well known for his lust for women and had raped countless girls in the company, sparing only the plain-looking ones. He’d arrange for a girl to stand sentry alone at night, and when it got dark, he’d drive the only jeep in the company to the checkpoint, where he’d rape the girl. He was also fond of barging uninvited into the girls’ huts for bed checks; he’d lift their mosquito nets and reach in to grope the girls, who would be too frightened to make a sound. Even in public, he’d touch the girls and shamelessly proclaim: “This is the only way to eliminate barriers for us to be like a family. It’s benefical to the revolutionary work.”
The 2nd Company had been designated an elite unit, but Hu had used his position to commit criminal acts, putting everyone on edge. Some of the girls would scream if they heard a mouse in the middle of the night, thinking it might be Hu’s footsteps.
“Have you heard the name, Hong Yiming?” Nie brought up Hu’s old friend.
“Do you know him?” the old man asked him.
“I’ve met him.”
“He was 2nd Company’s political instructor; he and Hu were from the same village.”
“So that’s it.” Everything suddenly became clear to Nie.
Nie asked what happened to Hu afterward. The old man said the zhiqing rapes were eventually exposed and Premier Zhou Enlai personally conducted investigations. Eventually, more than a dozen soldiers in the 16th and 18th Regiments of the 4th Division in Hekou County were punished. The 1st Divison in Jinghong County executed three, and sentenced two to death with a stay of execution; two others were sentenced to life in prison. Hu Zihao’s evil deeds were also uncovered, and he was removed from his position while being investigated. When Commander Jia of an independent battalion in the 1st Division and Commander Zhang of the 2nd Regiment were executed, Hu knew his days were numbered, so he slipped across the border into Burma. Based on what the zhiqing told the investigators, at the very least Hu would have been sentenced to death with a stay of execution, and the person who tipped him off was none other than Hong Yiming, the political instructor and an old comrade of Hu’s, whom Hu had once saved in combat.
Hong was later punished for alerting Hu, and left the army before retirement age. The zhiqing later learned that the two scoundrels were responsible for the disappearance of Ding Lan’s brother, Qiangzi.
Now everything made sense.
The old man told how the wailing that night drowned out all other sounds. Zhong Xing’s brother, Zhong Tao, had been on sentry duty at the edge of the village and knew that something was wrong when he saw the blue flames over Lan’que Ridge. He ran all the way back, but by the time he reached the site, the third hut, where his sister and her friends lived, was nothing but charred rubble, with only a few lingering wisps of dark green smoke. The Dark Boy was dazed but tearless, as he desperatedly clawed at the ashes; all he found was a burned harmonica.
Before Nie and the driver left the big green tree, the old man told them that a middle-aged man had come to visit the graves a few days before. He’d also offered sacrifices at Shizi Cliff in the mountains. The old man had never seen the man before, but based on his description, Nie believed it must have been Zhong Tao.
Nie looked up at the sky as a myriad of emotions surged inside. He could almost hear the outcry in the inscription.
I can forget everything,
But not my first love in Yunnan.
My love, my eternal hatred, and a debt of blood.
You, Grinning Tyrant, run all you can,
But I will find you.
TWELVE
Heartache at Lan’que Ridge
— 1 —
(Flashback/A few days earlier)
On the slope at Lan’que Ridge, Zhong Tao parted the weeds to reveal Apricot’s grave as he recalled the scene of blooming apricot flowers twenty-eight years earlier. The flowers had weighed down the branches and painted the slope in pink. Under the setting sun, a gust of wind had sent the petals flying and dancing in the air before settling to the ground.
“Ah, Apricot rain,” someone had said.
“Apricot rain,” they all had echoed. “Apricot rain.”
The beautiful apricot rain had been a bright spot in the young boys’ and girls’ days of hardship in the border region. That and the sorrowful “Song of the Zhiqing.” Apricot always played her harmonica as accompaniment each time they sang the song. Zhong Tao could recall how she’d dressed in a checkered blouse, how her small hands had held the pink harmonica, and how she’d cocked her head as she played, losing herself in the melody.
He could almost see the look of innocence on her face, as he squatted by the grave to light incense and burn spirit money that sent orange flames dancing in the wind.
A blue flame appeared before his eyes. The accursed, nightmarish blue flame, lapping at his heart for twenty-eight years.
Zhong kept feeding spirit money into the fire. The flames quickly swallowed the yellow paper and turned his face bright red. Tears welled up in his eyes as he muttered: “Apricot, I’ve come to see you. I’ve avenged the evil deed and humiliation for you and Yuhong.”
Dark green smoke wafted into the air along with charred pieces of paper.
“You can rest in peace now,” he said, staring at the red star on the headstone.
He could not bring himself to dwell on what had happened that evening twenty-eight years before, when an evil specter roamed the grove of rubber trees. It was that devil in a green army coat who had ruined his beloved and destroyed his happiness.
On that day, Apricot was collecting rubber sap at the farthest edge of the grove, behind Lan’que Ridge. Hu Zihao, who’d had his eyes on her for a long time, sneaked into the grove for an opportunity to assault her. Several girls in the company had already fallen victim to his sneak attacks. Apricot was preparing to return to their base when she saw, to her horror, the evil Hu Zihao about to pounce on her. She threw down her bucket and took off running, but Hu came after her. He grabbed her from behind, threw her to the ground, and began to unbutton her pants. Apricot tried to fight him off and yelled for help.
Xia Yuhong, Zhong Tao’s girlfriend, heard the scream on her way back from work; she ran over and was shocked when she saw what was happening.
“Mind your own damned business! Get out of there,” Hu barked shamelessly.
“Help me, Sister Hong,” Apricot called out to Xia, who, without thinking, rushed up and pulled Hu off Apricot. She had no idea where she’d found the strength and courage.
“Leave her alone, she’s still a kid,” Xia pleaded with Hu, while turning to Apricot. “Run, Apricot. Hurry.”
“What about you, Sister Hong?” Apricot was shaking all over.
“Don’t worry about me. Run now. Quick.”
Apricot, her face a ghostly white from the fright, ran down the slo
pe.
“Very well, then, you can take her place.” The enraged Hu leered, an evil light shooting out his beady eyes.
Finally sensing her own peril, Xia Yuhong began to back away.
He pressed forward with a lascivious smirk, reaching out his evil hands to cover her mouth while dragging her off to the side. He jumped on top of her with lewd delight. “Who’d have thought a beauty like you would give herself to me? I’m going to have a good time with you today.” She kept fighting him off. When he forced his lips on hers and stuck his tongue in, she bit down hard, sending blood oozing out of the corners of his mouth. Enraged, he took out his pistol and hit her on the head with the butt, knocking her out cold.
Apricot ran back to the base and told her brother what had happened. Dark Boy and Qiangzi picked up clubs and ran up the hill to rescue Xia Yuhong. Hu Zihao was long gone when they got there, and Xia lay unconscious and bathed in blood under a rubber tree, her lower body naked and stained with blood.
Dark Boy burst out crying as he carried Yuhong back to the clinic, where they managed to save her life. But the damage was done; she woke up and couldn’t stop sobbing.
“Why didn’t you fight? Why?” the young, ignorant Dark Boy questioned.
She was quiet, humiliation and agony written over her ashen face.
“Say something. Why don’t you answer me?” Dark Boy demanded again, which was like sprinkling salt on a wound. In despair, she raised her weightless hand and slapped him, as large tears rolled down her cheeks.
Dark Boy realized his mistake too late; nothing could be done now. At that moment an unbridgeable barrier was erected between the two lovers. She began to avoid him and refused to be his girlfriend. An open wound remained with her; she changed into a different person, a depressed and glum loner. Two years later she was accepted into a college in Guangdong through an army recommendation and stayed behind to teach English after graduation. Then she went to study in the US.
But the tragedy wasn’t over yet.
Hu Zihao and Hong Yiming went to a meeting at the regiment office the day after Hu’s assault on Xia, and were gone all day. That night, Dark Boy and Qiangzi lay in wait on a path the two men had to take to return to base. They hid in a dense grove of trees, their eyes fixed on the path ahead; behind them was the shadowy Shizi Cliff. It was dark when they heard Grinning Tyrant humming a Henan tune as he walked toward them, followed by a tall figure, Hong Yiming. The political instructor was a calculating, manipulative man whom the zhiqing nicknamed Red Fox.