by Ge Fei
Unused to the wind that snuffs my candle in dreams,
I endure the batter of rain on my window when I wake.
Baoshen read the lines but couldn’t make much sense of it. News of Xiumi grew scarce after that, and Tiger heard nothing more about her.
*In November 1968, Meicheng County took steps to reform funerary practices in response to the government-directed movement to modernize old customs. A public cemetery was constructed in Puji. During the process of transferring remains from the old tombs to the new location, villagers accidentally discovered a golden cicada among a pile of bones in a cornfield on the western side of the village. Village elders confirmed that the bones belonged to the son of the revolutionary martyr Lu Xiumi; the boy had been shot by Manchu soldiers when he was only five years old. Yet the Lu family had neither direct descendants nor proximate relations. The cicada passed through several hands and was finally given to a barefoot doctor named Tian Xiaowen. An elderly jeweler melted it and reworked the gold into a ring and a pair of earrings for her. Dr. Tian became ill and passed away not long after. On her deathbed, she told several people that she could hear a small child whispering in her ear.
†In August 1969, Tiger was removed from his post as director of the Meicheng Regional Revolutionary Committee and punished as a class criminal in one of many struggle sessions taking place across the region. He returned to Puji four years later for what would truly be his final visit. He found his last resting place among the ruins of the old Lu family estate, hanging himself with his belt from the carrying timber of the studio. He was seventy-six years old.
Part Four
FORBIDDEN SPEECH
1
XIUMI spent three months in the Meicheng county jail before being transferred south of the city to an abandoned guest house filled with cotton. A Western-style garden villa in a nearby valley served as her last residence as a prisoner.
The villa, ringed by a wrought-iron fence topped with iron spikes, was originally owned by a female missionary from the United Kingdom. The powerful silence of unvisited forests enveloped the villa night and day. Its garden featured Chinese gazebos, crooked walkways and brick-lined paths, and a bronze statue of an angel on a fountain. Years of exposure to the elements had turned the angel’s skin bright green. In order to convert the pious Buddhists to her own Christian faith, the sixty-two-year-old missionary had immersed herself in Buddhist studies, even teaching herself Pali. Five years later, she converted to Buddhism. In 1887, she wrote a letter to the bishop in Scotland, openly proclaiming that “Buddhism is superior to Christianity in every respect.” God’s wrath followed soon afterward. In July 1888, a sudden outburst of mob violence claimed her as a victim. Her body was found in a sparsely populated temple north of Meicheng, having been subject to “horrifying brutalization.”
The garden villa separated Xiumi from all contact with the outside world save the calls of birds and evening thunderstorms. She found it a perfect arrangement. Day after day of quiet repose and mournful leisure suited her clouded brain and tired body very well. Truly, no place could compare with prison. The carefree state enforced by the loss of one’s freedom she experienced as deep relaxation.
After the revolution, Long Qingtang threw himself into new struggles for local power. By the time he remembered the captured revolutionary from Puji, Xiumi had been imprisoned for a year and three months. Long Qingtang felt no desire to cause her further harm; on the contrary, he frequently sent people to check on her and send her tea, expensive snacks, and household items. Xiumi returned or gave away most of these gifts, keeping only an inkstone and inkstick, a goat-hair writing brush, and a book on raising silkworms for herself.
Long Qingtang, acquiring a general impression of her state of mind and her interest in silkworm trees, thought to encourage her studies, and sent her Fan Chengda’s famous treatises My Village Chrysanthemums and On Plums, Chen Si’s The Crab Apple, Yuan Hongdao’s History of the Vase’s Heart, and Han Yanzhi’s Tangerine Record. Reading the books inspired in Xiumi mixed feelings of hatred and gratitude toward Long Qingtang. That autumn, not long after Xiumi was allowed to move freely about the garden, Long Qingtang sent her several bags of plant bulbs. Among these were a few that looked like a cross between garlic and narcissus, which she planted in the sandy soil around the fountain. In the early days of the following spring, their green shoots broke through the ground, and as the days passed they grew into tall, thick stalks topped with heavy buds that a few spring rains helped open into blue and purple blossoms. Xiumi had never seen such beautiful flowers before.
Flowers and plants gave her a degree of pleasure she felt she didn’t deserve, driving her back into a deep sadness. Even the faintest scent of happiness disturbed her calm and stirred up memories of a humiliating and furious past, especially of the child she had given birth to in prison. She never even had the chance to look at his face.
He had been born only a few breaths away from death. In the confusion of that night she still vaguely remembered an old woman with a red flower in her hair and dressed in coarse black felt taking him away from her. Maybe they buried him, or maybe he was still living; Xiumi heard nothing and asked no one about him.
After her body recovered, she summoned an alarming force of will to train herself to forget the child, along with all the people she had known and the events she had experienced. Every face—whether of Zhang Jiyuan, Dapples, the stable boy at Huajiashe, or the tireless revolutionary activists she had met in Yokohama—became indistinct in her mind, turning faint and distant, ready to dissolve at the first breeze. Reflecting on her own past once more, she felt like a fallen leaf caught in a river, trapped in the current and dragged through the water before she could even make a sound. Her life had not been voluntary, nor wholly compulsory; she couldn’t say she despised it, yet it had never brought her any comfort.
When Baoshen came to visit her, she refused to see him, replying only with a line of verse: “Unused to the wind that snuffs my candle in dreams, / I endure the batter of rain on my window when I wake.” When Long Qingtang sent orderlies inviting her to the opera, she sent a written reply: “My mood is no longer suited for any kind of pleasure.” It felt like the final ritual farewell to her past, a final acceptance of self-torment. Punishment and self-abuse afforded her an appropriate comfort while overwhelmed by grief. Her life had no objective except the enjoyment of sorrow.
Now the only problem was her impending freedom. She felt like the news had come too quickly. She didn’t know where her true resting place might be.
•
The day before her release, Long Qingtang came to visit her. It wasn’t their first meeting, but it would be their last. His role had recently changed from acting provincial governor to president of the Meicheng regional branch of the Progressive Society. While he didn’t know that Xiumi had become completely mute, he was forgiving of the latter’s silent indifference. Of course, he did suggest that she stay in Meicheng and work alongside him. He even offered her a new position on the spot: director of the Agricultural Encouragement Association.
Xiumi thought for a moment, then laid out paper and ink and replied with a couplet:
While spring’s embrace makes the crab apple a fine nest for swallows,
When autumn passes the mountain elm is already empty of cicadas.
Long Qingtang’s cheeks flushed when he read it. Nodding, he replied, “Then what do you plan to do once you’re out of prison?”
Xiumi wrote, “At this point, a beggar’s life suits me best.”
Long Qingtang smiled. “I doubt that would be appropriate. You’re too pretty, and far too young.”*
Xiumi didn’t reply. She decided to return to Puji, which, of course, was the only thing she could do.
•
High summer had arrived; merciless heat sapped Xiumi’s weakened body of strength. After lunchtime, an enchanting tranquility descended on the town. E
verything seemed new and unfamiliar to her: the leaning shop fronts and the rows of black roof tiles on the verge of collapse; the white clouds piled high above tiled roofs; the listless water sellers; the fat farmers asleep beside carts of melons; the children chasing each other through the alleys and sword-fighting with bamboo switches, which made a hollow whizzing sound through the air like the vibrations of a temple bell.
This was her first exposure again to the sweet disorder of the real world, a chaotic mess in which everything still existed in its given place. She felt a deep sense of reassurance walking at a measured pace, examining her surroundings, her mind empty. Only the buzzing flies acknowledged her presence.
The road from Meicheng to Puji passed through ten or so villages of different size. Though by now cooking beneath the noonday sun, Xiumi could still recall a few of their names. She had heard them recited in nursery rhymes as a child, and they abided in a tender and inviolable place in her memory. Her mother would take her to visit relatives in Meicheng, seating her in a palanquin, in a wheelbarrow, or in a basket on a porter’s back; she would peer through the red curtain of the palanquin at the strange people in the street as she listened to her mother sing:
Out of West Gate Village through East Gate Village
From Qianxi Town to Houxi Town
And the barrows in between . . .
Perhaps it was the familiar melody, or the sudden wave of half-estranged sensations assailing her, or the hazy image of her mother’s face floating against a dense forest that brought tears of remorse to Xiumi’s eyes. She was no revolutionary, nor was she her father’s successor on his hunt for a Peach Blossom Paradise or a young woman staring out at the sea from a wooden house in Yokohama; she was a baby, dozing in a cradle that rocked its way down a rural avenue in the early morning. It was painful for her to think that by the time she realized she could begin her life anew from within the depths of her memory, that life had already concluded.
When she stopped to beg for water in a village called Douzhuang, the locals thought her nothing more than a deaf and mute beggar. Her exaggerated gestures attracted a large crowd, many of whom were children. They threw clods of earth at her to see how she would react. Her submissiveness and silence piqued their curiosity, and they followed her, making faces and screeching as they circled her. They tried scaring her with caterpillars, leeches, wasps, dead snakes, and other unrecognizable animals; they used slingshots to fire pellets at her face, and even tried to push her into the reed-filled bogs by the roadside.
Xiumi kept up her steady pace on the road, not speeding up or stopping to look around, not showing the slightest trace of anger or elation on her face. Eventually the children—confused, disappointed—tired themselves out and stood by the bog to watch her pass into the distance.
Once she was alone again, Xiumi stopped by the roadside. She thought of Little Thing, how he had collapsed in the drainage moat in the temple courtyard, frigid meltwater murmuring around his small, inert body. Black lines of blood extending slowly across the snowy ground until one of the pillars of the covered arcade blocked their advance. Even in that moment she’d known that it wasn’t only blood that flowed out of his skinny body but the whole of his child’s spirit.
“I’m such a fool,” she whispered under her breath.
She reached West Gate Village just as evening fell. On the county avenue leading up to the village, the road thick with dust, she ran into a hunchbacked old man.
Xiumi observed at first glance that he was a real beggar as well as a seasoned and inquisitive old lecher. He fell in close behind her, following her like her own shadow without saying as much as a word. Nor was he impatient to act. The stench of his body followed her, too, even reaching her nose when the two lay down some distance from each other in a threshing field to sleep for the night.
A cool night breeze blew away the daytime heat. One by one the windows in the village went dark, and the stars lit up in the sky. The beggar lit a fire in a pile of reeds and bitter artemisia to drive away mosquitoes. Each studied the other’s face in the firelight. The beggar pointed to a pile of straw not far off, and said the only thing he would say to her: “If you need to pee, go behind that straw pile, don’t hold it in.”
Grateful tears brimmed in her eyes. Why am I crying so easily? she wondered, as she fought to control her emotions. This isn’t a good sign.
She awoke the next morning to find the beggar gone. He had left her a hollow gourd full of clean water, half a cucumber, and an old sock full of bad rice that emitted a pungent odor. A beggar’s gift was a true gift, yet she had no way to repay him. Had he wanted to have her the night before, she probably would have let him. It isn’t my body anyway; let him ruin it if he wants. Giving herself voluntarily to such an ugly, filthy old man would have been impossible. Yet only impossible things were worth trying now.
*Long Qingtang (1864–1933), scion of a wealthy family of salt merchants, entered the mafia in 1886 as an operative for the Treasure Shade Triad, and gradually took over the illegal salt trade in the Yangtze River delta. In 1910 he was appointed acting provincial governor in Meicheng and assumed control of the local military garrison. After the Republican Revolution he entered politics, and served as deputy chief strategist for the Patriotic Citizen’s Commission to dethrone Yuan Shikai. In 1918, he retired from military service and went to Shanghai to become an opium smuggler, eventually rising to the top of the city’s mafia hierarchy. In 1933, his conspiracy with Huang Jinrong to assassinate Du Yuesheng, Chiang Kai-shek’s staunchest mafia supporter, was exposed when the assassination attempt failed, and he was tied to a stone and thrown into the Huangpu River.
2
XIUMI arrived home in Puji. Her first impression was that the rooms and courtyard of the family estate had shrunk, the place far more cramped and dilapidated than the grand quarters she remembered. The courtyard walls leaned under their own weight, while the mortar at the top of the walls curled up in sharp, brittle triangles like tallow-tree leaves, or like a crowd of butterflies. The wooden pillars and stone pedestals were full of cracks. Black columns of ants marched back and forth through the old beehives and up the walls in long, twisting lines.
Chickens and ducks ran wild around the courtyard. One of the rooms in the eastern wing (the room in which Mother had taken her last breath) had lost its inner-facing wall, which had been replaced with a fence made of poplar and locust boards to corral an old, black-dappled sow. Her litter of spotty piglets pranced around the pen, then stopped immediately upon hearing the sound of footsteps, pricking up their long ears.
Xiumi watched a large white goose with a reddish-brown crest at the top of the courtyard steps carry its heavy abdomen slowly down toward her. The bird shook itself briefly, then emitted a spurt of liquid feces that dripped down the stone stairs.
Good heavens. Xiumi shook her head and sighed as she walked into the rear courtyard. Magpie’s masterpiece—a domestic barnyard scene.
Aside from a few duck boxes in the bamboo grove, the rear courtyard was essentially the same. Arboreal shadows floated across every surface of the abandoned space; a row of sparrows looked down from the wrought-iron railing of the studio.
•
Magpie must have heard about Xiumi’s release from prison because the courtyard had been swept. A pile of rotting leaves and dry grass was piled in one corner; a fine layer of sand had been sprinkled on the stairs of the studio to prevent slipping. Xiumi studied the side door through which her father had disappeared over ten years ago. That narrow doorway had become her most significant memory, the central pivot around which all her memories turned. She had relived that sunlit afternoon innumerable times, searching for something that might explain the enigma of an instantly vanishing present. The oilcloth umbrella, almost completely destroyed, still stood in its original place by the door. Insects had chewed away the oilcloth, leaving only the bare ribs. She could clearly recall her father picking it up
and opening it right before he went out, leaving her with that eerie, timid smile and his last words: “It’s going to rain in Puji very soon.” After more than a decade of neglect and exposure, this umbrella wasn’t necessarily any more decayed than Father was the day he had walked out that door.
Silence filled the estate; Magpie wasn’t there. Xiumi climbed the stairs to the studio and pushed open the door—not much had changed, including the smell of mildew she knew so well. A white porcelain vase on the dresser by the head of the bed contained a newly picked lotus blossom. For some reason, the sight of the flower brought tears again.
When Magpie returned, Xiumi was fast asleep.
Magpie had left early that morning for market day in the neighboring village with a full basket of eggs to sell and returned home with every single one. At noon, she bumped into Walnuts Yang’s wife, who whispered in her ear, “The Principal’s back.” News of her imminent release had reached Magpie’s ears almost two weeks earlier, but the Principal’s actual return agitated her. She hurried home with one hand covering her basket of eggs. The old ferryman Tan Shuijin met her as she neared the front entrance to the village.
His hunch had become more pronounced. Clasping his hands behind his back, he looked obviously displeased, and hailed her with “So the madwoman is back?”
He took a few more steps toward her and continued, “I hear she came back alone?”
Magpie understood the real meaning behind his questions. The first implied that he was still upset about the brutal death of his son; the second that he was thinking of the unborn baby Xiumi had taken with her. Poor Shuijin had secretly hoped Xiumi had brought his family’s child with her. The bump in her belly had been the last glimmer of light in his old age. But if she had returned by herself, where was the child?