Dreams of the Red Phoenix

by Virginia Pye

  At the Buddhist temple, Charles bent double and put his hands on his knees. As he caught his breath, he noticed that the grand spreading cedar tree had been struck and had lost a few limbs. He ran up the low steps and saw light streaming in through gaping holes in the damaged roof. Normally it was so dark and smoky from incense inside the temple that you could hardly see anything, but now the slanting sun revealed that the idols had been badly chipped and shattered by mortar fire. Only one of the standing Buddhas remained intact. Around it, someone had placed fresh flowers, newly lit candles, and incense.

  Charles wondered who would even consider coming here on such a hellish day to light candles. He wanted to shout that people lay dying in the streets, and any strength should be saved for them, not for one’s ancestors, or the Buddha, or for that matter Jesus Christ. Back at the mission, additional services had been scheduled for every afternoon, not just Sundays. Charles couldn’t imagine why people would waste time praying instead of trying to stop the nightmare that was taking place around them. He wondered if he could ever make himself go to church again, knowing what God had allowed on this day. His father would tell him otherwise, but his father had not seen what Charles had seen.

  Outside again on the dirt road, he kept his eyes down and started spotting small treasures—ammunition clips, cartridge cases, a canteen, and hundreds of pieces of paper with the Japanese flag printed on them. He scooped these items up and stuffed them into his pockets alongside his father’s phoenix chop and his penknife—all for what purpose he didn’t know. From the ground, he lifted a Chinese Army cap with the blue-and-white Kuomintang insignia and twelve-pointed sun. He slapped it against his leg, and yellow dust scattered. As he put it on, Charles wished he could show Han, but he was starting to suspect that his friend might already have one of his own.

  With the mission compound in sight just up the road, two Japanese soldiers shouted in Chinese for Charles to halt. Before he knew it, the tip of a bayonet had knocked his new cap off his head.

  “We could have shot you, America,” a young Japanese soldier shouted. “Foolish boy, do not wear Chinese Army cap.”

  Charles realized it was the kid who had swept their back steps. “Hey, how’s it going? How come you’re still here?” Charles asked. “Looks like the rest of your company’s moved on.”

  “Do not ask questions,” the older soldier said. Then he turned to the younger soldier and asked, “Who is this kid?”

  “This is no-good, spoiled American,” the younger soldier explained.

  The older Japanese soldier pressed Charles’s shoulder with the sharp tip of his bayonet.

  “Hey, now,” Charles said, “I’m not the enemy.”

  “America is weak, worthless country.”

  Charles tried to think fast, tried to think at all with the bayonet blade so near his neck. “Say, you fellows ever hear of Jean Harlow, the movie actress?”

  Their eyes remained unflinching.

  “You know about Hollywood, right?”

  The older soldier may have nodded.

  “Then you know that Hollywood’s biggest star is Jean Harlow.” Charles was surprised by the jauntiness of his own voice. “She’s my girlfriend. That’s the truth of it. She and I been going steady for a while now.”

  The older soldier cocked his head, and the younger one leaned forward almost imperceptibly.

  “I need to get going,” Charles said as he started to back away. “My girlfriend’s waiting for me. Jean Harlow. Remember that name. You see her on the screen someday, and you’ll know, she’s my girl. See you around, fellas.” Charles offered a little wave, turned, and started to stride off.

  “Halt, America!” the older one shouted.

  Charles’s frantic pulse whooshed in his ears, and he worried that he might faint, but he swallowed and turned back. “What now?” he asked. “My girlfriend’s going to be mad if I’m late.”

  “You no Hollywood,” the younger one said.

  “You bet I am!” Charles said. “I’m Hollywood all over!”

  The soldiers glanced at one another, and in that instant, Charles snatched up the Chinese Nationalist cap from the ground and took off running.

  “American devil!” they shouted after him.

  Charles pulled the cap onto his head and felt like himself for the first time that day.

  Nine

  Over the following days and weeks, the injured continued to arrive from the countryside. Shirley’s brief nursing experience, which had begun in the emergency room at Cleveland General, then shifted to daytime hours in the pediatric ward, had done little to prepare her for this. Chinese came, leaning on one another and on sticks, some carried in on homemade stretchers. All of them, Captain Hsu insisted, were civilians, although it seemed obvious to her that his men had simply disguised themselves. They exchanged their uniforms for peasant clothing or turned their shabby jackets inside out and stuffed their red-starred caps into their pockets. Despite Reverend Wells’s warnings against getting tangled up in the conflict, Shirley thought that even if the young men had been wearing proper uniforms, she wouldn’t have turned them away. Many weren’t much older than her son, and all were badly in need of care.

  Every day, Hsu stood by the front door and determined who would be seen and who would be denied care. Shirley’s feverish hope to help them all was impossible. She knew that. Her job was difficult, but when she glanced over and saw the captain shake his head at some beleaguered person, she understood that his task was even worse.

  When sporadic fighting erupted in the countryside at river and railroad crossings, or on roads that led to crucial mountain passes, more disguised soldiers arrived, along with hapless peasants of all ages who had been caught in the crossfire. Some engagements involved heavy artillery, though Shirley surmised that hand-to-hand combat also often occurred. The knife wounds alarmed her almost more than injuries caused by bullets. The Japanese seemed expert at slicing the bodies of their enemies, leaving them without fingers, hands or eyes. Shirley began to think that those hit by grenades or mortar fire were the luckiest because they would die the quickest.

  And then the Chinese women started to arrive, and Shirley thought that what they had survived was worse. Although the bulk of the Japanese Imperial Army had departed for the front to the north, several units remained in town and went on rampages, seeking food and the spoils of war. Chinese women stumbled into the clinic, barely able to walk. Some could no longer speak, their minds having left the shells of their flesh behind. The young girls were the most tragic, but several grandmothers had born the same treatment.

  Shirley couldn’t imagine that Doc Sturgis over at the infirmary was encountering anything worse. Reverend Wells had promised that she would receive the less challenging cases, but she soon realized that Captain Hsu, who seemed to have a network of Chinese throughout the mission, the town, and the region, either orchestrated, or was at least aware of, everything that went on. He could answer any question or see to any request, and Shirley had quickly come to rely on him, as did many others. It was also becoming clear to her that the Red Army’s infiltration of the province over the previous months had made it a target for the Japanese in the first place. The Red soldiers bore the brunt of the ongoing nightly air raids on the plains out beyond the town, yet Shirley couldn’t help but blame them for the trouble and wish they would move on to another province altogether.

  One evening, she sat at the bedside of a young soldier who appeared to have survived an attempted beheading. She had chosen not to wrap this poor boy’s head because she couldn’t risk having bandages stick to the horrific wound. The truth was that she would need them shortly for the next patient. The youth sat up with a dazed and distant expression, his skull essentially sliced open. She estimated that he would die within a half hour of arriving, and as he did, she held his hand until the end. He never spoke. And she, with all her expertise in the Chinese dialects of the region, did not say a word, either. She felt herself soften as she gently squeezed h
is hand. As he breathed his last halting breaths, she said a prayer in his language, not about Jesus but about finding rest and peace elsewhere and with his ancestors, his family far from here. When she finally stepped away from the bed, she did not cry. She felt more useless than ever but also knew that she had done her best under the circumstances.

  Captain Hsu appeared at her side and asked, as he often did, if she needed anything. Shirley raised her eyes and stared into the man’s lined face. She considered that his pockmarks and the scar over his right brow could have made him appear sinister and yet didn’t. Instead, he seemed serious but kind. That his eyes were even with hers came as a relief after this long day. She was tired of looking down into the faces of people she could not possibly save. They had stared up at her with hope, even when there was no reason for hope.

  “I could use a smoke,” she said.

  He reached into his jacket breast pocket and pulled out a tin case of hand-rolled Chinese cigarettes.

  “This will make me even dizzier than I already am.”

  “Did you eat, Nurse Carson?”

  She took a cigarette and wandered toward the screen door, where a slight evening breeze seeped over the threshold. No one waited in line any longer, but several families had bedded down for the night on the wide verandah. She stepped outside, and Captain Hsu followed. He lit her cigarette with a match struck on the side of the brick house. Shirley stood on the top step and smoked.

  “You did well today,” he said.

  “I did all right. But, luckily for me, the revolution is not about a single person, but the whole.”

  He smiled. “I think you have only a partial understanding of what I’ve been saying to you.”

  “I’m teasing,” she said and sent a stream of smoke into the night.

  “You are the one who continues to ask me questions,” he reminded her. “I am happy to work alongside you without philosophizing.”

  “I enjoy our conversations, Captain.”

  Through the open windows came the moans of her patients. The town itself was quiet now that the Japanese Imperial Army had moved on to different parts. But far beyond the compound, periodic mortar fire struck the earth. Several weeks before, Japanese aircraft had hummed loudly and low over the foothills. The distant echo of their bombs had surprisingly caused the bottles of medicine on the shelves to tremble. According to Captain Hsu, the fighting had returned to the ground again soon after, as the young warlord’s troops confronted the enemy to the east, and other factions fought to the north. The captain would mention these areas of engagement casually, in passing, and never with any explanation. Shirley’s overall impression of the military actions taking place in the province around her was like that of a picnicker hearing the buzzing of bees in nearby flowerbeds but never quite seeing them.

  Still, although a dull sense of menace hung over her days and a feeling of futility overwhelmed her at times, Shirley shook out her arms now and was oddly grateful for the sensation that shot through her with something like vitality. Though surrounded by the dying, she felt inexorably alive.

  “Now that you mention it, I am hungry,” she said and rose on her toes and stretched. “How about you?”

  “Famished.”

  “Shall we go into the kitchen and make something?”

  “Nurse Carson knows how to cook? I did not think American women knew how.”

  “We do. We just don’t cook here in China.”

  “And why is that?”

  “It isn’t done. We have cooks instead.”

  Captain Hsu nodded.

  “You don’t happen to know my cook, do you? He disappeared some weeks ago.”

  “Yes, I know him.”

  “Oh,” she said and wondered if there was anything—besides modern germ theory and some Western notions—that Captain Hsu did not know. “Will you tell me where he is?”

  The captain took his cap from his pocket, ran his fingers over the brim, and appeared ill at ease for the first time since they had met. “I can tell you that he is all right,” he said.

  “But you can’t share with me where he is?”

  “I think it is better this way.”

  “What way?”

  “For an American woman to make her own food for now, since she is good at it.”

  She took another puff and studied him. The red star on the cap in his hands caught the light before he tucked it back into his pocket. She would get nothing more from him this evening.

  “I’m not sure how it got like this, foreigners having cooks,” she said, “but that’s the expectation. I couldn’t exactly go to market and haggle with farmers and the fishmonger myself, could I?”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  “You would have me do that, wouldn’t you? But we have servants to do that for us. We employ the Chinese fairly here at the mission. We pay well, and we don’t take advantage of them.”

  She thought the corners of his mouth rose slightly.

  “If you didn’t have the upper classes, whether foreign or Chinese, to employ people, the whole business would collapse,” she said. “But I forgot, that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  He finally chuckled. “Nurse Carson, you think this?”

  “Yes, I think this.”

  “Then yes is my answer, too. The whole business would collapse.”

  Shirley flicked her cigarette over the side of the porch. She didn’t like being teased, but she realized she was naive about politics and vulnerable to sounding foolish. It seemed such a harebrained idea to upend everything, though in China there was no question that the peasant class lived more wretchedly than any people she had ever known. The Russian serfs had no doubt had it bad, but who could say in 1937 if life was better for them under Communism? And now the poor Russians were dealing with Hitler, so none of it mattered, anyway, as they tried to simply stay alive. Still, Shirley had to guess that if Communism was ever to work, it might work here in China, where poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy kept the people in the Dark Ages—though now, in this war with Japan, there were other, more pressing concerns.

  “That’s enough of that,” she said. “Let’s have supper.” She started toward the door.

  “Thank you, but no.” Captain Hsu bowed. “I have my men to attend to. You enjoy your meal.”

  “But you haven’t eaten all day, either, and they must be asleep already, your men, whoever, and wherever, they are.”

  “I have told you about my men, Nurse Carson. They are country boys. You have met a few of them yourself. And they are hungry, too. So I will go now. Please excuse me.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, are you suggesting that I feed them, also?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  Captain Hsu did not reply.

  “I haven’t mien for them all.”

  Again he did not answer.

  “And my son, wherever he is, must be hungry, too. I’m sure he’ll be home any minute. I can’t just give away the last of what’s in my larder. Who knows how long this siege or whatever it is will go on?”

  Her head was pounding, and whatever exhilaration and camaraderie she had felt before were now being extinguished by exhaustion. She wished she could blink and have the whole lot of them disappear. Blink and have Caleb at her side again. But the best she could do was retreat inside and try to put out of her mind the captain’s stern and quizzical gaze.

  “Good night, Captain Hsu,” she said and started in.

  “Good night, Nurse Carson. I will be back again at dawn.”

  Shirley let out a slight groan, stepped over the threshold, and skirted around the Chinese asleep in her front hall. The kitchen, located in a small dependency off the back of the house, was dominated by a mud-encased brick kang that Cook normally kept fired with logs or coal. It stood cold now, and the low-timbered room remained dark. The truth was, Shirley hadn’t cooked here, not even once, and had only visited the kitchen a few times. That seemed a sorry thing to admit, but there it was: she didn’t know the first thing abo
ut how to make a meal in China.

  She lit a kerosene lantern that hung from a hook by the stove. There appeared to be no electricity in this shadowy hut—quite unfortunate, given that a kitchen was precisely where you needed the best light. She wished Caleb were here to correct the situation but realized that now all such problems fell to her. Over the past few weeks of running the clinic and making her home function as efficiently as possible, she had started to sense that her husband had neglected a great many things around the house because of being occupied elsewhere. She had come to realize there was much she didn’t know about him—about his friends like Captain Hsu, what he truly believed politically, and no doubt other things as well. And wasn’t it odd, she wondered now, that she had been so little aware of the workings of the household while her husband was alive? She had to wonder what else had gone on under their roof without her knowing it.

  With one hand, she held aloft the lantern, and with the other, she searched around on an open shelf, shifting heavy bags of grain in search of something to cook. She found several iron pots—or rather one pot and one frying pan with edges that sloped up more like a bowl, a Chinese invention, that wok thing she had heard about. Then she reached for a parcel wrapped with string that she hoped held noodles. She picked it up off the shelf, and a rat scampered out. Shirley caught herself before the scream escaped her mouth but trembled from head to toe.

  “Dear Lord,” she said. “Vermin, too!”

  She sensed someone behind her, lifted the large frying pan in her hand, and turned. “Keep back!” she shouted.

  Standing before her was the little Japanese grandfather who ran the only fish market in town. He bowed low. Shirley let the pan fall to her side as she, too, bowed low. He bowed even lower. She bowed lower. He was starting to bow for a third time when she banged the pan on the stove, and said, “Konnichiwa, grandfather.”