Dreams of the Red Phoenix

by Virginia Pye

  “Charles-Boy,” she said now, “I brought you some steak. I thought you might be starved.” She pulled a white cloth napkin from deep in the pocket of her raincoat and began to unfold it.

  “Don’t call me that. Don’t ever call me that. That was Lian’s name for me, not yours.”

  “But are you hungry?” Shirley tried again. “I have something for you.” She held out the steak on the napkin in her open palm.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked. “No one has food like that anymore. Not even the fine hotels along the Bund.”

  Kathryn leaned in and said, “I’ll eat it if he doesn’t want to.”

  “Don’t take it,” he said fiercely to her. “It’s poisoned.”

  Shirley wrapped the steak and stuffed it back into her pocket. “Don’t be so righteous, son,” she said, and tried to stand taller but couldn’t muster the strength. “I just thought you might be hungry.”

  He glared down at her. “It’s corrupt, Mother. That steak is corrupt. Like the black car you arrived in. You left me to join the Reds, but now you show up in an official’s car with a Japanese driver. I saw him when he opened the door for you.” Charles shook his head in disgust. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to. I don’t even know whose side you’re on, anyway. I think you’re on no one’s side but your own, that’s what I think.”

  “Jesus, Charles,” Kathryn said and swatted his arm, “That’s enough. If you were my son, I’d wash your mouth out with soap.”

  “It’s all right, Kathryn,” Shirley said.

  Charles was correct, she thought. She had made a decision for no one’s benefit but her own and her family’s, and at the expense of others. What she had done was a sin, and she didn’t need her husband here to remind her of that fact. Though not a highly religious person, she now understood in a biblical sense that she had crossed over into some vast, desolate valley and must spend the rest of her days wending her way back. Any mild impulse she had felt to do good for others seemed trivial in light of her treachery toward Captain Hsu. She would have to carry on his, and her husband’s, good works in repentance.

  “I didn’t see her get out of any car,” Kathryn said as she swung toward Charles and rubbed a finger on his lapel. “You must have eagle eyes, Charlie. How did you spot your mother with the thousands of people down there? I think you were looking for her awfully hard.” Then she turned to Shirley and leaned on her arm. “You see?” she said. “There’s a good sign. Your son was searching for you, right at the same moment you were searching for him. Come on, now, you two, time to make up.”

  Charles’s jaw remained set, and his arms stayed crossed tightly over his ribs.

  “Is that true?” Shirley asked as she gazed up at him. “You were looking for me, son?”

  Charles put his fine new shoe up on the ship’s railing and shrugged.

  “Who knows, Charles,” Kathryn said in a slurred but cheerful tone as nudged closer to him, “someday you may even be proud of your mother. She’s our own Mata Hari.”

  Shirley wanted to peel her friend off her son and might have done so, but Charles elbowed Kathryn away himself, and rather harshly. Shirley wondered what had gone on between them, though, whatever it was, he had no business treating a lady like that. Then something occurred to her about her boy that seemed even more disturbing and wrong.

  “Charles, let me get this straight,” Shirley began. “You saw me from up here on the ship, and yet you didn’t come to greet me? What if I hadn’t found you in this crowd? Would you have simply waited until we bumped into one another like a couple of strangers?”

  “Of course we’d find each other, Mother. We’re going to be on this damn boat together for over a month.”

  With his raised chin and imperious tone, Shirley realized that he sounded just like her at her worst. Charles was behaving arrogantly, dismissing her in the way that she had dismissed others in the past. “Do you know that I would have left the ship if I hadn’t found you? Then what would have become of us?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to give up my spot here at the stern,” Charles explained. “We nabbed it two hours ago, and I’ve had to push people away ever since. We’ll get the best view as we leave old Shanghai, won’t we, Kathryn?”

  Kathryn nodded, but Shirley sensed that her friend was as perturbed as she was.

  “You couldn’t be bothered to meet me after all I went through to get here?” Shirley asked again. “I sacrifice any last vestige of goodness and now receive this in return?”

  Before Charles could reply, a sudden giddiness began to overtake her, and she started to laugh. He seemed startled by her outburst, and although Shirley tried to control herself, a strange and pleasing lightness rippled through her body for the first time in weeks, perhaps months. She had lost her husband, betrayed her Chinese friend, and come frighteningly close to losing her son as well. It was all too much.

  But she had not lost her son. And she would not ever risk that again. From now on, she had no intention of letting him go astray.

  “Oh, thank heavens,” she sputtered, “I see now. I understand. You still need me. I believe you really do. You may be a young man,” she said as she straightened her spine, pulled back her shoulders, and spoke as sternly as she could, “but your behavior, Charles Carson, is completely unacceptable. Do you hear me, my boy?”

  He lowered his chin in direct proportion to how high she raised hers.

  “I don’t ever,” she said and poked his chest with a finger, “ever want to hear that you have disregarded other people as if you couldn’t be bothered with them. You learned that from me, and it is high time you unlearned it.”

  The cocky, know-it-all expression slipped from his face. Before her stood the good boy that he truly was.

  “It isn’t right for us to put ourselves first at the expense of others,” she said. “Do you understand me?”

  He nodded.

  “After all our years in China, I would think that you might know more about filial piety than you have shown me today. Would Lian have approved of your behavior?”

  Charles shook his head.

  “Would Han?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “All right, then,” she said and stepped closer and lowered her voice. “The truth is, I’m a poor example for you. But without your father here, we must help one another to stay on track. We are our brothers’ keepers, as he used to say. We are one. We must remind each other of that. But I think we can do it if we put our minds to it, don’t you?”

  He offered another nod.

  “Good.” Then she held open her arms and said, “Now, give your mother a proper hug.”

  He fell toward her more gladly than she could have hoped.

  “I love you, my dear, and always will,” she said.

  “I know, Mother,” he said and dipped into her embrace.

  After a long moment, he stepped back and said, “Here, come stand with us. It really is an excellent spot to wave farewell to China.”

  The three Americans stood side by side at the railing. Shirley placed her hand around the metal, and to her happy amazement, Charles set his much larger one on top. Very few things in life, she thought, would ever feel as satisfying as that sweaty, strong palm on the bony back of her hand.

  An image came to her in that moment, as it would often from then on: Captain Hsu smoking as he leaned against the wooden railing on her front porch, a wry, knowing smile barely raising the corners of his mouth. He would forever be pointing out to her her weaknesses and the weaknesses of her people. He would serve as her insistent reminder that she rise to be her better self, as she had, however briefly, on these shores.

  The enormous ship began to rumble. Deep in the hull, its engine spun the massive propellers as ocean water frothed at the stern. The final horn blasted over their heads, startling Shirley so badly that she gripped Charles’s hand. He laughed and squeezed hers in return.

  “We’re going home, Mother. We’re finally going home.”


  He looked as excited as a small boy, the one she had known so well and still knew even now, though differently. A roiling wake formed behind them as they left the chaos on the shore. The boat created a fierce and unyielding undertow—so strong that if a person slipped and fell into it, he would be sucked downward and drowned in its thick embrace. History had done the same here in this country they were leaving behind. Her husband had slid into it and died instantly in a landslide, while Captain Hsu, Shirley feared, had met it in an enemy bullet on a wet and lonely night in the mission courtyard, with herself to blame.

  And yet, despite her sorrow, Shirley had come to love this vast and maddening cipher of a country. The Middle Kingdom, as China had called itself from ancient times, Center of All Under the Vast Heavens, was known as encompassing all things in all seasons: the brick walkways and dusty grounds of the mission compound, the grassy plains where peaceful streams ran past willows, the purple-shrouded mountains in the distance, and even the teeming, desperate streets of Shanghai. As she and her son left it behind, morning sunlight sliced the air over the masses, coating the foreign bank and merchant buildings on the shore in a fiery wash.

  Acknowledgments

  My grandmother Gertrude Chaney Pye was a missionary in China from 1909 to 1942. When her husband, Reverend Watts O. Pye, died in 1926, Gertrude did not return to America but instead chose to remain in Shanxi Province to raise her son, my father, Lucian W. Pye. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, then occupied North China in the lead-up to the Second Sino-Japanese War that started in 1937, she stayed. When my father went off to college in the United States in 1939, Gertrude still stayed. Only Pearl Harbor finally forced her to leave. She made passage in 1942 on one of the last boats out, the Gripsholm, a neutral Swedish ship. As a child, I heard many stories about her, but one in particular stood out: during the Japanese occupation, she shooed Japanese soldiers off her front porch with a broom.

  When I mentioned this anecdote about my grandmother to my editor, Greg Michalson, who I was fortunate to work with on my first novel, River of Dust, he suggested I write a new novel inspired by her experience. I’m deeply grateful to him for his literary wisdom and keen editorial eye and for his excellent team at Unbridled Books. I’m also thankful to my delightful publicist, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, and to my generous agent, Gail Hochman.

  China and Japan scholars Patrick Cranley, Prof. Richard J. Samuels, Virginia Stibbs Anami, Rick Dyck, Jeanne Barnett, and Pat Barnett Brubaker helped me grasp the history of North China in the 1930s. My story was informed in particular by the biographies and journals of three American women who lived in China during that era: Agnes Smedley, Helen Foster Snow, and Nym Wales. The China experiences of my father and his closest friends, Charles T. Cross and Harold R. Isaacs—uncle and grandfather figures to me as a girl—were also crucial, as were seminal texts by Edgar Snow and Jonathan D. Spence, numerous other personal accounts of that time, and several studies of warlords, including one by my father.

  This novel was written in his memory and is also for Eva and Daniel, who show me the way as they blaze forward in life.