by Virginia Pye
“Li Juan.”
“That means beautiful,” he said.
She remained unsmiling, her head bent with strands of dark hair draped over her sallow cheeks. He knew he should say her name was perfect for her, but he couldn’t make himself form the compliment. “You seem sad. Are you missing someone?” he asked.
She appeared startled by the question but then nodded.
“Did you lose someone?”
She nodded again.
“A parent?”
“My mother has been gone from me.”
Charles swallowed hard. The Chinese had strange ways of saying things without coming out and saying them, but he supposed she meant that her mother had died. “I’m sorry.”
“My grandmother and I must leave again soon,” she said.
“But you just got here. It’s too dangerous to go back to where you came from.”
She shrugged.
Charles stood and said, “You need to stay with us. If Lian doesn’t want you in her quarters, come to the big house with me. My mother’s got the whole Red Army in there, so she won’t even notice.”
“The Red Army is at your house?”
“Just some injured soldiers disguised as peasants.” He sat down again, closer to her this time. “I should be whispering about that, shouldn’t I? I’m lousy at this.”
She smiled, and he wondered if he could reach over and take her thin hand in his again. He remembered how it had felt. But then he glanced down the alley and noticed Lian headed toward them at a rapid clip. As always, she took small steps but managed to move very fast. She was bent with a braided straw basket on her back, held in place by a strap around her forehead. Such baskets were used by laborers or farmers during harvest; bow-legged men who came up from the coal mines, misshapen by the weight of the rocks in similar baskets on their shoulders.
“Here, Lian, let me help you with that,” he said and went to take it off her.
She shooed him away and set it down on the packed ground. She wheezed, the humid, sunny day clearly getting to her. The basket was filled with clothing and towels torn into strips and used as bandages, now covered in dried blood.
“What are you doing here, Charles-Boy?” she asked.
“I saw that your chimney needed fixing,” he said and pointed to the ladder.
Her eyes shifted from Charles to Li Juan and back. “You are man of the house now, I see. You carry on Father’s duties. Very good. Soon you study for pulpit and join other ministers and visit parishes that Father love so much. Excellent, Charles! Mother will be most proud. Off you go. Time to study Good Book!”
“Esteemed Lian,” he said, and kicked a pebble up the alley, “you of all people know that life’s not for me.”
Li Juan sprang from the bench then, raced forward, and threw her arms around Lian. She pressed her cheek against the older woman’s plentiful chest and cried out, “Ma-ma,” as if she could hold back the word no longer. Charles wondered if he’d heard right, but then she said it again.
Lian patted her on the head. “Sit down, little niece. Sit, tired one. She is exhausted from many travels,” she explained to Charles. “She does not know what she says.”
The old grandmother’s screeching voice came from inside the shack. “Is that my daughter I hear? Is that my Lian? I hope you brought us warm buns to eat and a delicious feast of duck and dumplings, but I suspect you did not. No matter. Come to Mother so I tell you all the things your daughter did wrong today. She is sullen girl and of no help to me.”
Li Juan shouted at the open door in the country dialect, “I’m worn out with you, Grandmother. Who wouldn’t be with all your complaining?”
Lian’s hand shot out and swatted Li Juan’s backside, but the girl was quick and escaped a second hit. She hid behind Charles’s back, and her small, powerful fingers wrung his arm.
“I thought you said your mother was dead,” he said.
“My mother is not dead!” she said. “She is here, with you and your mother, but never with me! She is gone from me all the time.” Tears welled in her eyes and tumbled down her cheeks.
“Madam Lian,” Charles asked, “is this true? We thought you didn’t have children.”
“Do not bother me, Charles-Boy.” Lian looked down into the basket of dirty laundry and shook her head. “I have work to do. Out of my way, you bothersome children.”
Charles turned to Li Juan. “Lian is your mother?”
“And Dao-Ming is my little sister,” she said.
“We thought Dao-Ming was an orphan. Why didn’t you tell us, Lian?”
She reached into the basket and grabbed a handful of rags as if she intended to wash them right there in the dusty alley. “I needed a job. I say I am from town and have no family or they do not hire me. But it is no matter now.”
“So Li Juan has lived without a mother for many years, and you without your child?”
“You are my child, Charles-Boy. That was how it is. Li Juan knows this.”
He tried to keep hold of Li Juan’s hand, but she pulled it away.
“I wish you’d told us. I’m so sorry we didn’t understand.” Charles looked to Li Juan, but she continued to glare at her mother. “I think you’ve done enough for today, Lian,” he offered. “You should stay here and be with your family. We can manage without you.”
Lian squinted up at him. “Maybe you are man of house now, after all. You have grown up. You are like son to me. I have no real children of my own. I might as well be barren.”
“You are not barren!” Li Jung shouted. “I am your daughter. You have two daughters!” She turned to Charles and said, “You see, she does this. She convinces herself she has no children. It makes no sense. I used to think she did it so she wouldn’t miss me so much, but now I think she does it because she doesn’t want me. ”
Lian shook her head. “Sad truth, I have no boys. I must do all the work myself. I am cursed. I have Dao-Ming, who is like small animal. But Li Juan, you are strong. You must do your part for the family. That is what girls are for. Otherwise they are useless. You must get along with your grandmother!”
Lian lunged at her daughter for the second time, and the girl skittered around behind Charles again. He couldn’t imagine such a thing. In his household, his parents hardly ever raised their voices and certainly never a hand to him.
“Mother,” Li Juan said, “things can change. I can live with you now. This young American says it’s okay.”
Charles made himself stand taller in the way his mother did when she wanted to assert her authority. “I wish to invite you and your family to stay at our house, where you will be safe and where we can share our food and supplies. And best of all, where both of your daughters can join you.”
Lian’s expression remained stony, but Charles thought he saw a faint glimmer in her eyes. “Mrs. Carson does not need more mouths to feed,” she said. “I already have one child underfoot who eats all the time. They said Dao-Ming would die young, but she is sturdy as water buffalo and looks like one, too.”
“Mother!” Li Juan said. “That’s not nice. My sister can’t help it. I will keep her happy and out of the way so you can do your work. And I hardly eat a thing.” She inched closer to Lian and continued, “I am very good at cooking and at doing chores in the house. I am strong. Feel this!” She held up her thin arm, and Lian squeezed it like a melon at the market.
“With Cook gone, I suppose I could use some help,” Lian said.
“I can do it for you!” Li Juan said. “You will see.”
As Li Juan tried to convince her mother, Charles recognized the look in his amah’s eyes: she was secretly pleased with her daughter. She did not offer a reassuring smile but sternly assessed the young lady before her and approved. Li Juan took Lian’s hand now and led her to the stone bench. She sat her down and knelt before her and began to massage her red and swollen hands.
“I will do laundry for you to start with,” Li Juan said. “I am good at laundry.”
Lia
n leaned back against the mud wall and shut her eyes. Li Juan looked up at Charles in a way that was finally a little bit like the girls in the movies. But now, he couldn’t imagine how she’d ever really like him, knowing that he had stolen her mother away from her for all those years. He would try to make it up to her, although he knew that nothing could fill the hole a missing parent made in a child’s heart.
Charles gathered up the ladder and headed back toward home through the crowded mission compound. It worried him that the Chinese seemed to have erected more established lean-tos out of wood, cardboard, and tin. Their cooking fires burned incessantly, carrying sharp, charred odors that seeped into every corner of the mission. They appeared to be here to stay.
The massive red doors of the chapel stood open, and a line of coolies rose up the steps and into the darkened chamber. Charles doubted they were lined up to attend service; they were probably waiting instead for rations of rice and millet. At the entrance, the diminutive Reverend Wells looked lost amid the barefoot crowd in tattered clothing. The rickshaw drivers, who usually hung about outside the gates of the mission, ready to pounce on any potential customers with boasts and bravado about their services, had pulled their carts up to the chapel steps, where they waited for food with everyone else. They were always the thinnest and wiriest of men, and Charles wondered how they had been managing on even less food than usual. One of them listlessly lifted his head and called out to Charles. The man’s concave chest was bare, and every rib pressed against his skin, giving it a bluish, almost bruised tint.
“Here,” Charles said and reached into his pocket. “It’s not much.”
The man’s hand shot out and snatched the oatcake from Charles’s palm. The snacks always tasted like straw, but he still carried one or two with him whenever he went out. The rickshaw driver clearly didn’t mind its dryness. The man wore a burlap bag with holes cut in it for his legs and tied with a frayed rope. Charles stood beside the shoeless skeleton as he gulped down the last of the crumbs.
“I give you ride!” the rickshaw man shouted. “I take you to your home like prince! Best ride in town! Smooth and fast! Faster than all others!”
Several other rickshaw drivers growled their usual denunciations and curses about their competitor’s abilities to do the job as described.
“I’ve got a ladder,” Charles said.
“I carry it for you!” the driver shouted.
Charles couldn’t imagine how the man mustered such enthusiasm. “No, you’ll lose your place in line if you do.”
The man gazed up the steps to where the rations were being dispensed. The poor guy was probably starving, Charles thought. “You can take my mother and me to market sometime soon,” he offered.
“Excellent!” The man bowed. “I give you best ride in town!”
Charles moved on. When he came to the stone steps that led to the top of the wall surrounding the compound, he set down the ladder. It had never been risky to leave anything lying about in the mission. You could return days later and still find whatever you had left. But now, as he glanced at the many strangers passing by, he decided it was worth the risk of losing the ladder. He took the steps two at a time, came out above the compound, and hurried to the corner where he and Han had built the pigeon coop. The anxious sounds made by the abandoned birds made his chest tighten. He had forgotten to feed them for he wasn’t sure how many days. He wondered if he should let them go free now. He didn’t want it on his head if they died of starvation in their cages, though if he let them go, they would be eaten in no time. Either way, the poor things were making a racket and seemed not long for this world.
But when he reached the coop, he saw that their tray of food had been filled and their water replenished. They were making all that noise as they gorged themselves. Charles took off his Nationalist Army cap and watched them eat. Who was taking care of them? he wondered. Maybe it was Han? He missed his friend so badly in that moment that he walked over to the side of the wall and shouted.
“Han!” he yelled. “Where the devil are you?”
Charles studied the gray tile rooftops of the modest town. Little had been done to clear the rubble from the original Japanese attack that had woken him that morning weeks before. Several homes on the outskirts had collapsed into their courtyards, their private rooms exposed to the street. From what he could see, the market remained derelict, but that was often the case by this time of year, when summer drought left the farmers with nothing to sell. Piles of debris and earth blocked the central road to the west, requiring a more circuitous route. The townspeople had been inconvenienced by the summer’s military incursions and remained wary of troops of any sort, even their own. But since the bulk of the Japanese Imperial Army had departed, they no longer felt in imminent danger. Shopkeepers opened each morning by sweeping yellow dust from their steps but kept their windows boarded, just in case. Fewer Chinese families fled on paths leading into the plains, where the fields of hemp shimmered golden brown in the heat. The countryside needed rain, but that was to be expected in high summer. All in all, Charles thought, things seemed as ordinarily dismal as ever.
The few Japanese soldiers who remained behind behaved as they had during the earlier occupation before the fighting began, milling about and generally ignoring the Chinese. Two younger ones stood directly below the mission wall, and Charles tried to see if he recognized them. With their caps on, it was hard to tell. An officer finished speaking to them, then turned and marched away. Charles squinted and thought he recognized the Japanese boy who’d swept their back steps.
“Hey,” he shouted down in the local dialect, “how’s it going out there? It’s me, Hollywood!”
Charles wasn’t sure what he meant by calling out to them. Later he tried to think it through, but the truth was, he didn’t mean much. He just missed Han and figured the other fellows who were about his age weren’t so bad to talk to. At the sound of his voice, the two young soldiers scurried across the dirt road and ducked behind a barricade made from the destroyed guardhouse. Charles could see the barrels of their guns pointing outward, searching, he assumed, for the source of the voice that had shouted at them.
“Whoa, guys,” he called again, “take it easy. It’s just me, Hollywood. I’m not the enemy.”
One of the soldiers tipped back his cap, and Charles could see his familiar face. He was about to tease the kid about Jean Harlow again when he heard a sharp retort. Charles felt the bullet go past so close it whistled in his ear, just like in the movies—shrill and piercing and far too near. He ducked down fast and slumped against the side of the wall, his heart going wild in his chest. The dumb Japanese kid, he thought. Charles would report him to his commanding officer. He would tell his mother. As a neutral American on American soil, Charles had been shot at by the Japanese.
But then he yanked the Chinese Nationalist cap off his head and twisted it between his hands. As his breathing calmed, he wanted to shout to the kid that this wasn’t a game, but clearly the Japanese soldier knew that already. Charles was the one slow to understand. He should never have worn the cap. He had almost gotten himself killed. He told himself he had to face things as they truly were. He was alone now, without his best friend or his father.
He cleared his throat and tried to think what his father would want him to do. He sat up straighter and remembered something so obvious it startled him. Every time his father had left the compound on one of his tours to the outlying parishes, he would say, “Take care of your mother, my boy.” He had said it even when Charles was small. The request had always mystified him, since clearly it was the other way around: his mother had taken excellent care of him, perhaps too good care, fussing over him and seeing that he got anything he wanted. Yet his father had asked him to take care of her. Charles had no idea how to do that when Nurse Carson was more headstrong than ever, but he knew he must try.
But first he needed to find Han. He could do nothing to get his father back, but at least he could make an effort with his fr
iend. He stayed low as he made his way back to the pigeon coop. The plumpest and handsomest of the kit had been Han’s favorite. Charles unlatched the cage of that bird now.
“You miss him, too, don’t you, Hsiao P’angtze?” he asked, calling their best bird by the nickname that they had given him: Little Fat Boy. Charles stroked him all the way down his sturdy back. The pigeon cocked his head to the side and seemed to be listening.
When Charles was young, his father would sit on the edge of his bed before sleep and use his hands to make shadows in the lamplight against the wall. He had shaped his fingers to become bunny ears and a round tail. His thumb and forefinger would part to resemble the mouth of a barking dog or a howling wolf. But Charles’s favorite by far was when the hands wove together and flapped, mimicking the wings of a phoenix rising up into the flickering light. Charles could still see the magical bird taking off, courageous and free.
Lian had taught him that the phoenix Fenghuang was also known as the August Rooster. Contained within it were all birds, and other brave creatures, too, representing the full range of Yin and Yang in life. It appeared in auspicious times and brought goodness, virtue, and grace. From high in the K’un-lun Shan Mountains nearby in North China, where it lived, it would someday swoop down and bring everyone below good luck. Lian had boasted that those in the North were most likely to profit from such auspiciousness, which seemed to Charles a feeble perk given the many hardships of living in the region. Still, when she told him to keep watch for the Chinese phoenix as it circled the sky above the compound, he did. At any moment, the bird might descend, she said, spreading immortality and happiness. Charles looked about him now and longed to see its shadow.
“Find Han!” he whispered, pressing his mouth to Little Fat Boy’s feathers.
He could feel the fast-beating heart as the bird’s small system quivered, eager to take off. Charles raised the pigeon above his head and flung it out and over the wall until it disappeared into the cloudless sky.