Lili forced his mouth open, swept a finger deep inside, hoping to dislodge a piece of food blocking the upper airway. There was nothing.
“Get me a chair!”
Chi-Wen shouted in Cantonese. A chair immediately appeared.
Lili grabbed the child, sat on the chair and lay the choking boy’s face across her knee. She delivered several gentle thumps with the heel of her hand between the child’s shoulder blades.
Nothing.
“Aii-ya, aii-ya!” The agonized cries of the mother watching helplessly nearby.
Several more thumps and a tiny peanut popped from deep within the child’s throat. It neatly arced across the dining car, landing on the floor several feet away. The little boy squirmed from Lili’s grasp into his mother’s arms.
“Xie, xie,” the mother sobbed her thanks.
An older man dressed in a Western suit came over and bowed
formally. Chi-Wen translated, “You have saved my grandson’s life.”
“I’m happy I could help.”
The man waved away her modesty, shook her hand, then exchanged a few words with Chi-Wen.
“What did he say?” Lili asked.
“You see that poster?” Chi-Wen asked, pointing to a picture on the wall of a woman with an unusually large bosom holding a young boy.
“Yes.”
“The inscription reads ‘She is a good comrade. She has only one child.’ ”
Lili glanced over at the grandfather smiling at his grandson, his expression filled with love.
“That boy is the only child in his family.”
Lili, remembering what the girl in the bookstore had said, understood the enormous value placed on this one male child’s life.
“That was wonderful, Dr. Quan, I mean Lili.” Chi-Wen said.
And then, as if Lili’s saving the young boy had unleashed a need to talk, he shared his hope of one day becoming a doctor himself, how he had recently passed the university entrance exams and was waiting to be admitted.
It was only when Lili asked why he hadn’t gone to medical school earlier that she caught a trace of uneasiness. “I . . . uh . . . circumstances prevented it.”
“You mean the Cultural Revolution?”
Chi-Wen’s jaw tightened. He took a deep breath, started to speak, then changed his mind.
“At least you’ll go soon,” she said encouragingly.
The train whistle annoucing their arrival at Changsha station saved him the necessity of a reply.
Five minutes later they descended from the train. “We’ll need to change for Shaoshan here,” he said.
“What tune is the clock tower playing?” Lili asked.
Chi-Wen studied her speculatively. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“It’s called ‘The East Is Red.’ ”
Though curious, the melancholy in Chi-Wen’s voice put an abrupt end to Lili’s questions.
Newport Beach, California
The wealthy industrialist evinced little surprise at the second overseas call. After listening to the proposition, DeForest agreed a meeting was in order. And as soon as possible
Shaoshan, China
One day in 1966, over one hundred twenty Chinese wearing red armbands and Mao buttons completed a four-day pilgrimage from Changsha to Shaoshan, where Mao was born, waving flags and singing ditties set to music from The Little Red Book. Now, more than twenty years later, Lili and Chi-Wen arrived in Shaoshan on an empty train. The young bridegroom had been right, Lili realized. The station was barren; the large parking lot devoid of buses. They wandered past the huge statue of the “Great Helmsman” in the empty park. So eerily vacant and quiet, it reminded her of a stage with a struck set.
For the next day and a half they explored Maoist shrines. The duck pond where he swam, the field that he plowed, the old schoolhouse where he studied, the house where he was born were all abandoned. In seventeen of the Mao Museum’s eighteen rooms, the leader’s early life was displayed in great detail through pictures and captions: his school days, his job, his travels, the death of his brother, the Long March, the war, his first marriage. However, his entire chairmanship from 1949 through his death in 1976 was telescoped in the last room. Not only was there no mention of his other marriages, but his fourth wife, Jiang Qing of the radical Gang of Four was airbrushed out of the photographs.
In the museum shop Lili asked the clerk for a copy of The Little Red Book.
“All sold.”
“Will you be getting more?”
“Out of fashion,” she explained through Chi-Wen. “They’re
history.”
“Well, ask her what she does have.”
The clerk pointed to counters filled with razor blades, cigarettes, and men’s underwear.
“No Mao souvenirs?”
The woman opened a box and pulled out several key chains with color photos of Hong Kong movie stars.
“Never mind.”
An hour later Lili and Chi-Wen sat in the almost empty hotel
dining room. “Amazing,” she declared over bean curd and cabbage.
“It’s chili peppers that give Hunan food bite.”
“Actually I was thinking about the last few days here. Why does everyone want to forget that Mao existed?”
“Not forget,” Chi-Wen spoke carefully. “Just placed in the proper historical context.”
“And what’s that?”
“A man who did great things for our country, but who also made
. . . mistakes.”
“Like the Great Leap Forward?” she asked, referring to the economic fiasco of 1958 that led to millions of Chinese starving to death.
“Yes.”
“And the Cultural Revolution?”
Wary now. “That too.”
“Tell me what it was like.”
“Is this part of your sightseeing?”
“No,” Lili replied, meeting his troubled gaze. “I’ll admit I am curious. But I want to know what it was like for you.”
For a moment, he didn’t respond, then as if considering where to begin his story, he said, “I was nine in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started. Eight, by Western standard.”
Lili nodded, aware Chinese added a year to age, the so-called womb-time period.
“Four years later, I was sent to a work camp in central Mongolia. It didn’t have a name. Just a number. Three hundred forty-five. They called us ‘soldier farmers.’ Volunteers for our country.”
He spoke without pause, unable to control the avalanche of
feelings stirred by old memories. “We were told to learn from the
peasants. But we didn’t live with them and we rarely worked together. They resented that we ate their meager rations, so we were isolated in tiny mud huts, ten to fifteen in one room.
“The cold. That was the most difficult part. I can still remember the raw nights. No heat or electricity — only one oil lamp for the group. Every morning at five, our leader would blow a whistle waking us to exercise before breakfast. First, though, we had to sing a verse of ‘The East is Red.’ ”
Caught up now in memories, Chi-Wen began to sing the Maoist revolution song in a soft voice: “The east is red from the rising sun, In China appears Mao Zedong, He is our guide, He leads us onward to build a new China —”
As he translated, Lili appreciated Chi-Wen’s reaction the day before. The song clearly evoked his years of suffering.
“Nothing kept us from our daily routine — not the cold, not the wild dust storms that came out of nowhere lasting for days.” He saw her sympathetic expression and shook his head. “No need for pity. It was no worse for me than for thousands of others.”
“But to be separated from families and denied a chance to attend college. You’d have a right to complain,” Lili declared.
“Now, yes,” he acknowledged. “But in those days, to complain was considered revolutionary.”
“What did you expect when you were told you were g
oing away?” Lili asked.
“People’s Liberation Army soldiers came to our middle school and told us conditions in Mongolia were wonderful — beautiful grasslands to walk in, horses to ride. They promised we could visit our families every year. But, of course, it wasn’t so. Once we were settled, they told us that unless we married in Mongolia, we could only return home once every three years.”
“You must have been homesick.”
His smile was sad. “When I first arrived, I was filled with a sense of possibility. I believed we had an obligation to reshape our world through hard physical labor — like Chairman Mao had done as a boy. I studied Mao’s teachings diligently and I worked hard. But as time passed, I became less sure this was the only way to help China. I missed school. The peasant girls had contempt for intellectuals. And I often thought about my family.”
Lili studied him, wondering whether to probe further when Chi-Wen continued.
“My father had a hard time during the Cultural Revolution. Mao decreed nine categories of enemy: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents,
capitalist-roaders, and the Stinking Ninth — the intellectuals. Father was an intellectual, singled out because he was an English professor at Fudan University.”
“What did he do?”
“No American can ever understand. He did nothing. My father was a wise and gentle man. Unfortunately, he was also very literate. They said he hurt China. They made him wear a dunce cap and walk through the streets reciting ‘I am a cow’s demon’ all day.”
“An evil spirit?”
“From Chinese mythology. Mao first used this expression to describe the intellectuals during the Anti-rightist Campaign of 1957. He said they were evil spirits in human form when they pretended to support the Communist Party. When they criticized the Party’s policy, they reverted to their original shapes. During the Cultural Revolution, it was applied to anyone considered politically deceitful.”
For a few moments Chi-Wen sat silently. His eyes seemed haunted by the dark shadows of memories. “I even criticized my own father,” he said finally.
“You were young.”
Chi-Wen waved away her attempt at consolation. “They subjected him to hours of ‘struggle sessions,’ demanding he admit things he’d never done. When he wouldn’t, they beat him.”
Lili spotted a tear at the corner of Chi-Wen’s eye.
“Mother didn’t know what to do. She loved the Party, and never believed they would hand down the wrong verdict. Her traditional Confucian sense of family obligation told her to defend her husband; her political allegiance required that she damn him. In the end, Party loyalty won out and she declared him an enemy of the state and demanded a divorce.
“Father couldn’t take the shame. One day my mother found him hanging from a cypress tree.” Chi-Wen’s voice cracked. “She blamed herself and stopped eating. A few months later she was dead too.” The tear traveled down his smooth cheek. “I felt so . . . bitter,” he faltered,
“. . . at my parents, at myself, at Chairman Mao.”
Without thinking, Lili reached out and took Chi-Wen’s hand in hers. Silently she cried for him, for all that he had lost — his childhood, his education, his family, his happiness.
“How to balance the need to serve one’s country with the need to serve oneself. I still don’t know the answer.”
For a long time, they sat facing one another, holding hands. Two people from opposite cultures. And yet, Lili considered, there
was something in Chi-Wen that made her feel as though she were looking at herself. At what her life might have been if she’d been born here.
Later that evening on the train ride to Wuhan, Chi-Wen’s thoughts were in turmoil. He’d made his peace with life in China and now Lili was turning everything upside down. He had never before encountered anyone with the temerity to confront feelings and ideas head on. He found her directness oddly intriguing. How different from the shy, tongue-tied girls he knew. He couldn’t help feeling something unique had brushed against the orderly fabric of his life and he would never be the same again.
Everything was slipping, events rearranging themselves without his conscious will. After so many betrayals that had taught him to trust no one, after so many years of ren, of enduring without feeling, he was telling this stranger about his past, his fears, even his hopes.
As the train pulled into the station, he told himself again that he was not falling in love with Lili Quan. Then she smiled and he knew that he was only fooling himself. What was happening to him was already beyond his control.
Wuhan, China
When Chi-Wen made his required telephone call to the foreign minister at ten p.m. he dutifully reported the events of the past three days including the university demonstration in Guangchou, leaving out only the hand holding at lunch. Whatever guilt he felt at this omission was pointless, however, since Lin had received the complete account of his activities an hour earlier.
Thursday
April 20
Xi’an, China
“Ah, Dr. Cheng, so good to see you up and about.”
“Dr. Seng.” Ni-Fu’s smile was genuine. He was glad to be back at work. Especially happy to be with his patients, eagerly anticipating the arrival of his granddaughter.
“Mind if I observe your rounds? No matter how often I watch your examinations, I’m always impressed by how much you learn from a mere touch of your hands.”
Ni-Fu nodded, though he suspected that Seng, vice chairman of the revolutionary committee and medical director, was not really interested in expanding his medical horizons. Trained in England in the 1930s, Ni-Fu was an expert at bedside diagnosis, unlike Seng who had studied in the Soviet Union.
Ni-Fu walked to the next to the last bed in the small ward. As in most hospitals in China, each patient was expected to provide his own sheet, pillow, and cotton quilt. It was a practice that, to Ni-Fu, increased the already dangerously high rate of infection. But like so many new ideas felt intuitively by old-timers to be counterrevolutionary, his argument fell on deaf ears.
The wheezing of the elderly man lying prone on the sheet was unresolved by the array of hot glass cups across his back. Cupping, a favorite therapy Seng learned in Russia, though relatively useless, did provide some comfort. After a careful listen through his stethoscope, Ni-Fu agreed that symptomatic relief for this patient’s severe lung disease was all they had to offer.
“Are you a textile worker, Mr. Yi?”
“Yes,” he wheezed, “twenty-five years I worked in Number Five.”
And breathed in cotton dust, Ni-Fu surmised.
“Byssinosis,” he said naming the disease that would likely kill Mr. Yi within a few years if not months.
“I agree,” Seng declared. “But I’m anxious to hear your diagnosis for this last case. The rest of the staff is stumped.”
Rising to the challenge, Ni-Fu followed him to the last bed occupied by a sixty-year-old woman who had propped herself high up on pillows.
“Do you feel better that way?” He took hold of her hand as they spoke.
Mrs. Sun nodded. “It burns when I lie down.”
“How long have your fingers been swollen?”
“My mother also had ‘wind in the bone,’ ” she replied, the Chinese explanation for rheumatism.
Except that this wasn’t the ordinary osteoarthritis typical of aging. Ni-Fu noted the leathery appearance of Mrs. Sun’s skin and her generalized muscle wasting.
“Do your hands and toes turn blue when it’s cold?”
Although the woman tried to laugh, her face registered no expression. “I’m always cold. My husband says it’s because I’m from the South.”
When he’d finished listening to her heart and lungs, Ni-Fu turned to Seng. “We ought to talk outside.”
“I take it you’ve made a diagnosis?” Seng asked.
“Yes, although I need to check my texts from England. It’s been more than
forty years since I’ve seen a case of diffuse scleroderma.”
Seng had never heard of the disease.
“That’s because it’s so rare in Asia. But I saw many cases in my training. Mrs. Sun’s response to cold, the tightness of her skin, the loss of expression in her face, the muscle atrophy, the arthritis, even her gastrointestinal symptoms could be attributed to scleroderma.”
“What causes it?”
“Overproduction of collagen, though that’s never been proven.” So long cut off from his colleagues beyond China, he added, “At least not to my knowledge.”
“And the treatment?”
“It’s too late for steroids. Besides they would aggravate her esophagitis. I’m afraid we can only offer her symptomatic relief. If she’s lucky, she’ll have a remission and live another five or ten years. Her heart and lungs don’t appear to be involved yet.”
“Impressive,” Dr. Seng acknowledged. “Always enlightening to be at the bedside with you.”
Ni-Fu nodded, eager to escape this fawning bureaucrat.
“Of course,” Seng added, “I expect you’ll spend tomorrow in your lab. Everyone is anxious to see your research proceed.”
Everyone, Ni-Fu thought bitterly. He knew Seng really meant
Foreign Minister Lin and his two treacherous comrades. Time was running out. He had just a few days to set a plan in motion.
Wuhan to Suzhou
At Wuhan, Lili and Chi-Wen left the train and boarded the Golden Line No. 10, a rusting five-decked steamer that would carry them toward Shanghai. Only April and already the heat and humidity justified the area’s reputation as a furnace of the Yangtze. The boat was crammed with over twelve hundred Chinese citizens, most traveling fourth class. The galleries, lined with twenty-four bunks, lacked even the minimal comforts offered by Lili’s second-class, two-berth accommodations. First class had apparently been eliminated entirely as a concession to equality.
Still, despite the squat toilets and lack of hot water, it was a rare opportunity to mingle with a cross section of the population. As she chatted with passengers driven on deck by the heat, Lili found a fascination with America.
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