He musters up the courage to turn and regard his new wife. In his youth and inexperience, he sees a landscape, the rolling field of a recumbent belly, breasts looming like forbidden mountains. Farther beyond that range, woman Luo’s dark eyes lie open like two gaping mine shafts, plundered and glassy, staring at the ceiling. She does not acknowledge his glance, although she must be aware of it. She is waiting for him, but still somehow dead to the world.
Waiting for me, thinks Tse-tung. That body, so easy to touch. So easy to reach out my hand and feel that rough cotton. Unfasten the buttons on her dress. Pull it apart and see what’s beneath. Smooth skin. Lift her leg and peel the shoe. Touch the turned-in foot. Right there: yours. Climb on top of her and press her arms into the mattress and push yourself deep inside her. You must act like a man. You are her husband.
Tse-tung’s arm feels trapped under a heavy stone. He wants to beg her to show some sign of life, a twitch in her fingers, or, better yet, a glance in his direction. Why won’t she acknowledge him?
“Miss Luo,” he says—but he’s shocked and sickened by the sound of his own voice. The tone, so much lower than usual, is the same as his father’s.
It’s enough to turn Tse-tung away from his bride. With his weak body leaning forward, he thinks, No, not Father, never be like him—cruel and callous and violent. He tucks his hands into the tight crevice of his lap. Luo’s presence in this room, lying on his bed, sucking in the humid air that should be reserved for his use alone, and mocking him with all her fancy sophistication, suddenly enrages Tse-tung. Get out of here! He wants to scream at her, out of the marriage dressing, out into the courtyard! He clenches his teeth together and crashes back on his bed, his hat tumbling onto the sheets. Although he’s lying next to his wife, staring at the same ceiling as her, Tse-tung might as well be in Peking.
A mosquito taps and taps against the ceiling, pulling away each time as if the boards were made from heated iron.
If only Tse-tung could melt into the mattress. He doesn’t know what he should do now; he can’t lie here forever. He is as trapped as the tiger the villagers caught last month in the pass. He knows he has no choice. His duty is yuan fang. He has gone through with the marriage and now it must be completed. But the thought of reaching over to touch woman Luo’s breast instills such panic that it halts his breath and makes him nauseous. Tse-tung raises his hands to his face and presses his palms into his eyes. He feels that the torrential downpours of planting season are now swirling inside him, a confusion of contrasting forces—the heat of his desire rising, the hail of his shame falling. He knows that his father wasted no time fucking his mother on their wedding day. He surely took what was his without a second thought. Yuan fang in one greedy minute. He plunged into her, fast and hard, careful not to waste time on the deed because the man thinks time is better spent on planting paddies, milling grain, selling futures downriver.
Tse-tung squeezes his eyes shut, wishing he could banish the image of his father violating his mother. But yes, the old miser must’ve torn through his mother, a quick furrow of her rich fields to claim them as his own.
The painful seconds of inaction grow into minutes. Tse-tung lies still beside his bride in the heat and dim light. Neither speaks. They blink and blink, staring at the rough palm boards above them, as if the ceiling might hold some insight into their joint future.
There’s a mantra of sorts passing through unnamed woman Luo’s head. Now, now, now. The rite is unfulfilled. Yuan fang is incomplete. It’s incomprehensible to her that he doesn’t just do it. Her body is seized with terror, with an awesome responsibility unfulfilled, encapsulated in this mantra of increasing fury, ultimately targeted inward, at her own unworthiness. The rite, the rite, the rite. She has long since suppressed her fear of the intimate act, to be performed for the first time with a hostile stranger. She doesn’t feel any relief, or harbour a secret desire for her new husband to fail. There is too much haze between Luo’s young body—wrapped tightly in cotton and entrenched in Confucian responsibility—and the so-called self that might desire an individual way. She cannot imagine a veering from the straight and pointed prescriptions of yuan fang or other rites.
Woman Luo, six years older than Tse-tung but still only twenty, has no name, has never had a name, never even imagined a name for herself. She has never met a woman in possession of an individual name. It is impossible for this girl to conceive of herself as an independent actor in the world. She knows that she only has worth as a body engaged in specific duties and requirements. Wash, sow, feed, mill. Earn a high bride price through impeccable manners and abilities. Marry and produce many sons. When she recalls her nightly pain from many years ago, those throbbing explosions centred in her broken toes and arches that sent shock waves up her legs, the months of immobility and subsequent tender steps, and even her wretched and putrid feet when finally unwrapped—the way they glistened with pus in the candlelight—she must also recall her grandmother’s whispered reminders about marriage and yuan fang, about this night, this very rite. Her grandmother’s soothing voice accompanying the terrible sting of the washcloth, the bite of tighter wrapping, the extended agony. “Marriage is the purpose of your life.” This rite of yuan fang. Everything must be buried away beneath this rite. And then she will have sons. Even the infuriating scratch in her chest, the first tickling of the tuberculosis that will leave her dead in two years, her insatiable need to cough as she lies on her husband’s bed, is suppressed beneath her fierce need to complete the rite, as it has been all day. One does not cough in the sedan. One does not cough in the tea ceremony. One does not cough in yuan fang. There is no question about that. The pain in her chest is nothing compared with the agony she feels from the complete and total inaction of the boy lying beside her.
An agony that won’t abate for the young bride tonight.
The rice paddies of Shaoshan valley are flooded for planting season. Tse-tung has hidden himself on a knoll, in the cool shade of a pine tree, near the old tomb wall. His conical hat and a half-empty sack of young rice shoots rest beside him.
He has been reading and rereading a section of Water Margin, his favourite novel, under this tree for an hour. In it, the novel’s hero, Sung Chiang, kills his evil blackmailing wife Yan Poxi. Tse-tung has been imagining himself as that noble head clerk, wearing long silk robes, charging through the governor’s yamen on important business—the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman manipulate or corner him. After killing Yan Poxi, who’s been threatening to expose his growing relationship with the rebel factions, the hero retreats into the mountains and joins the fabled bandits at Liang Shan Po. Tse-tung admires how Sung Chiang smiles at his enemies and pledges allegiance to the authorities—but when cornered, proves quite adept at double-crossing them. He never has a wrong instinct. Tse-tung decides that he too will be fierce against injustice, generous to a fault, and the model of filial piety.
His gently floating fantasy snags on the barb of reality. He is incapable of filial piety. Neither Sung Chiang nor Tseng Kuo-fan, another of Tse-tung’s heroes, the great Hunanese leader who defeated the Taiping rebels and established a new Confucian orthodoxy, would ever have refused their fathers. Both of them would have performed yuan fang with woman Luo. All the helium of the boy’s fantasy escapes through this rough tear, leaving him deflated and limp.
His bowels rumble and he grimaces in discomfort, shifting his weight so he can release a loud fart. The smell is acrid and sharp, product of a troubled body. He can’t go on like this, with so much stomach trouble, nausea, exhaustion, and weight loss. He’s passed three endless nights without sleep, unnamed woman Luo lying beside him, her legs parted, ready for yuan fang. Three nights with only an hour or two of rest. His temples are throbbing and there’s a dull ache in his legs.
Now Tse-tung recalls his father’s vicious goading at the dinner table. “Why don’t you stick her? Look, she’s very pretty. It’s not like we married you to a plowing ox. It’s your duty to make her bleed.” After getti
ng no response, his father turned his wrath on woman Luo, who sat curled over her rice, unable to look at anyone directly in her state of constant humiliation. “Make yourself pretty, woman. Smile at the boy. Why don’t you show him what you’ve got? You’re not married without yuan fang. It’s your duty to produce a son.”
A patch of dark cloud passes overhead, dulling the midday light. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Tse-tung studies the low cover and guesses that it will pour in a few seconds, a rain lasting three or four minutes at most, and probably ceasing as quickly as it began. This is not unusual for a spring afternoon in Shaoshan. He feels the pressure all around him in the volatile pre-storm air, much like the climate in the village whenever he’s present—the incredulous squints and open grins of the labourers and landowners in the tiny shop where he exchanges sugar for pork, and the gossip and laughter at his expense as soon as he leaves. He knows what they’re saying about him. “Did you hear that Mao Tse-tung hasn’t yet slept with his wife? Impotent Tse-tung.”
The rain collapses on the countryside all at once. Tucked under the tree, only sporadic, thick drops pass through the foliage to smack against Tse-tung’s homespun clothes. He pulls his knees into his chest and hides his book behind his back. He shakes his head at the dirt, wishing he could disappear, but then chastising himself for that desire. He knows Sung Chiang wasn’t as lazy as he is, always reading under a tree. He knows that he wouldn’t last a single week in the company of real bandits. No, he would be mocked and forcibly expelled from their hideout. Why would heroic bandits want to have as a brother a little boy who can’t even sleep with his wife—no, not even a boy, but a weak, crying girl with dainty hands, a high voice, and an awkward shuffle? All he is missing are the bound feet.
The sunlight cuts through the dark clouds in angled shafts as the rain lessens. From atop his knoll, Tse-tung spies the labourer Wu working a few hundred metres away, standing ankle deep in the flooded field, his back bent as he plants young shoots. The clouds pass and the world floods with light, the irrigation pool sparkling around the rows of young shoots. Tse-tung wonders if Wu can provide him with a path out of Shaoshan, an escape from his humiliation. He grabs his book and tucks it into his large sack, slinging the sack around his shoulder. He puts on his rattan hat and marches into the muck of the rice paddy.
Wu is focused on his planting and doesn’t see the boy coming. He only glances up when he hears the suck of Tse-tung’s feet in mud. They nod at each other, Wu seemingly indifferent to the youth’s presence, and certainly not about to start mocking him openly for his failure with woman Luo. That’s good. Tse-tung will show Wu that he’s a real man, as capable of working the fields as any stoic labourer. He unwraps a wet cloth around his first batch of rice shoots and withdraws a small spade. He digs a hole in the mud and stuffs the shoot inside. Wu will know all about the nearest Ko-lao hui lodges in Hunan province, as easily half the labourers in the region are members of that ancient and rebellious society, which has long opposed the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty, and is clearly modelled after the bandits in Water Margin.
The landowner’s eldest son and the hired labourer Wu work side by side, each maintaining an efficient pace so as not to be called lazy by the other. Drops of perspiration slip from their foreheads and dissipate in the pool below. Their feet slosh in the mud. The rhythm of planting the rice lulls them both. The humidity is so thick that their repeated motions seem to carve ruts in the air. Tse-tung can’t bring himself to ask Wu his question, and yet, if he doesn’t, he’ll stay trapped in Shaoshan forever, as rooted in the earth as the rice shoots he’s planting. The work pains his back, but it’s also peaceful and cleansing. Tse-tung counts his shoots and realizes he’s planting faster than Wu. That’s a good sign; someone who works this quickly might someday become a leader of the Ko-lao hui, just like Sung Chiang. Tse-tung might succeed if he leaves Shaoshan and joins the bandits.
“When’s your next trip to Hsiangtan?” he asks suddenly, without stopping.
Wu flashes him a concerned look. “After planting season.”
“And then again in the fall?”
Wu stands and scowls, studying the boy. Tse-tung knows that every year, after the harvest and milling, Wu and another temporary worker pack the ox cart with Mao Jen-sheng’s surplus grain and lug it along the bumpy road to Hsiangtan, to be sold on the river for a tidy profit. Tse-tung has been managing the family’s accounts for the past two seasons. He knows the routine. So what’s he doing asking this question?
“I go every fall,” says Wu.
“You know many people there?”
Wu tilts his hat, wipes his brow with his sleeve, and resumes planting at a regular pace. “No,” he says, peering into the muck. “Very few.”
“A lot of workers arrive at that time, don’t they? All selling their masters’ rice?”
“I stay two nights, then come right home.”
“Do you know any Ko-lao hui there?” Tse-tung presses.
Wu stands abruptly, a rice shoot in one hand and a rusted spade in the other. “I don’t know anyone,” he says. “I keep away from Ko-lao hui.”
“But there must be lodges in Hsiangtan. Is it difficult to join one?”
Now Wu steps back in the mud, waving his arms. “I said I know nothing about that. Nothing at all! They’re bad people, those bandits. I pay the likin tax for your family and I bring your money home, don’t I? You’ve seen the books. I don’t smuggle and I don’t steal. I don’t want any trouble with Ko-lao hui. You understand? So you tell your father that.”
Wu resumes planting with a flat expression, as if he had never backed up in terror. The only sign of his distress is that he’s working faster, with performed concentration. Tse-tung blushes and tries his best not to alter his pace. The two men stuff rice shoots in their parallel rows. It was stupid to ask Wu about the bandits. Besides the fact that he’s acquired no new information, now there’s a risk of the labourer gossiping about the eldest Mao son to all his friends, telling everyone in town that impotent Tse-tung is interested in joining Ko-lao hui, news which would certainly get back to Jen-sheng and result in a beating worse than any he’s ever known.
But the hired labourer Wu is not so concerned with Tse-tung’s ambitions. He couldn’t care less about the boy’s rebellion against his landowning family, and only wonders who gave him away. Could it have been one of his blood brothers, some smuggler savagely tortured into a full confession by the Manchu authorities? It is useless to ask the questions; there are too many potential traitors. Wu knows countless bandits, and they know him, as he is a long-standing brother of one of the largest and most active Ko-lao hui lodges in Hunan. Each year, during his semi-annual visits to Hsiangtan, he engages in elaborate tea rituals with his fellow members, exchanging secret information by hand gestures, cup positions, and other hidden signs. He sells Jen-sheng’s surplus grain exclusively to Ko-lao hui merchants, since they have connections to smugglers along the Xiang river all the way north to Changsha, and thus can avoid paying the hated likin tax, which funds reactionary militias aligned with the Manchu government against the Han majority. Wu pockets the money he saves.
Two years ago, on the orders of his lodge’s chief dragonhead, Wu embarked on the longer journey to Lu-k’ou during the off-season to help run one of the lucrative gambling houses used to fund the bandits’ revolutionary activities. He offered his services as a spy on that trip, informing numerous lodge members of the Mao family’s growing wealth, and of Jen-sheng’s cruelty to Shaoshan’s starving peasants during the famine of 1906, how his master denied them grain in favour of selling the surplus. And on yet another occasion, Wu participated in the roadside robbery of a rich clerk, a plot that involved spiking the porters’ wine, like a chapter from Water Margin. The labourer knows that any of the dozens of people involved in those activities could have given him away.
Rather than worrying about Tse-tung’s adolescent tiffs with his father, Wu is wondering what will happen to him now, and to his wife an
d three little boys in the next village. Will he be fired, or something worse—arrested for treason and publicly executed? Wu wants to drop his sack of shoots and sprint out of Shaoshan valley, but instead concentrates on maintaining his composure while he works.
Hours pass in silent labour. Tse-tung plants the last of his rice shoots in the late afternoon. His lower back throbs and his lanky legs ache. He might even sleep tonight. He walks with a swishing gait along the dry dirt path between drenched fields. His family’s house has been painted a warm yellow, illuminated in the strong golden sunlight and contrasting strikingly with the thick greenery on the hill behind it. Viridescent shoots grow tall in adjacent paddies. There’s an enticing scent of hibiscus in the air. The fish pond, sprouting lily pads and open white flowers, is overrun with croaking frogs, audible from a distance. It’s deceiving, how peaceful his home appears. Tse-tung shuffles into the courtyard and steps across the threshold.
“Where have you been?” his father asks.
Tse-tung stands in the doorway, clasping his sack and his hat, his pupils yet to adjust to the diminished interior light. He sees only his father’s silhouette at the table.
“You haven’t done a second of work today, have you?”
The room comes into focus, exposing Jen-sheng and Hsiao, a second seasonal labourer. They are both sitting at the old table wrapping tomorrow’s shoots in wet rags. His father’s face, thin and sharp, holds perfectly round eyes, dark with anger. His mother and woman Luo are seated on the k’ang near the blackwood table with its bronze Buddha, the former mending a pair of Jen-sheng’s pants, the latter sewing a new shirt for Tse-tan, who has recently outgrown everything. Woman Luo is quiet as usual, following his mother’s instructions and never complaining.
“Lazy, no-good boy,” spits Jen-sheng.
The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers Page 8