Empire of Glass

by Kaitlin Solimine

  “No, I don’t know why Andong is Andong.” Skinny Wang squinted deeper into the scope.

  Fat Wang hammered on: “They called this city Andong—‘pacifying the east’—because we once controlled all that land, all of Korea.” We. Skinny Wang didn’t ask his comrade if he meant we the Communists or we the Nationalists. We meant so many things those days, was a pronoun fought over by both the Party elite and the provincial farmer. Fat Wang’s sweat, sweet as rotted sorghum, bombarded Skinny Wang’s nose as his comrade raised his arm to show him how much our China once owned; of course, Skinny Wang saw none of what he pointed toward, his back to Fat Wang, eyes scanning a distant shore, still searching for that ghostly face he saw seconds earlier.

  “Hold on,” he said, interrupting the history lesson. There it was: that white face again. He magnified the golden head, dipped the scope lower: white hands tied behind a thin, bent back, knees deep in frosted mud. The woman nodded forward. A cluster of men kicked at her prostrate chest. Her body fell limp. Men in army uniforms dug their heels into her back, flicked still-burning cigarettes into her nested hair.

  In the unfocused foreground, the cranes lifted their heads, swiveled their intertwining necks in a gleaming 8. Behind them, the woman hadn’t moved in minutes. The tallest man lifted her in his arms, threw her easily over his shoulder. Skinny Wang blinked, making sure he was seeing what he thought he was—a foreign woman, probably an American, held captive by Chinese and North Korean soldiers.

  “You have to see this,” he told Fat Wang, but just as quickly regretted his mistake—he hadn’t yet learned how we can inadvertently step into history’s sweep with a word, a gesture.9

  “See what?” A voice hovered above his shoulder. By the smell of cigarettes on the man’s breath, he knew it was Deng, the only man in the troop allowed a smoking ration. Deng shoved Skinny Wang aside and placed his eye to the scope.

  “Aiya,” Deng said, his gloved hands caressing the tube. “Looks like I’ll be making a trip across the river this afternoon.” Although Skinny Wang couldn’t see his commander’s pancake-flat face, he could hear the man’s smile rising like a schoolgirl falling in love. As afternoon sun blanketed the trees, the cranes on the distant Korean shoreline patiently flapped their wings, slowly lifting above the black river and into the golden-pink horizon. Their shapes grew larger as they flew toward the men, dampening the sky overhead and hurling shadows as big as jet planes on the winter-tough ground holding steady beneath their feet. Together, Fat and Skinny Wang glanced up long enough for the sun to be stamped out by birds in flight, their own shadows muted, lost. When their vision returned to earth, they saw Deng’s boat ribbon-cutting the thinnest section of frozen river, already halfway to that distant shore, a trail of broken ice littering its path.

  *

  They called the white woman ‘Nurse’ because when they first received her, she was dressed in a tight white cotton uniform like the other nurses attached to the unit.

  They called her ‘American’ because when they asked her questions, she always answered the same way: ‘No.’

  They knew the English word for ‘No’ from the smuggled Western films they watched projected onto a pillowcase in the 40th battalion headquarters in Andong on Saturday evenings.

  Deng said they should examine the films to study the behavior of the enemy. But they cared little for the frivolous story lines, couldn’t tear their eyes from the milky necks of the actresses, black eyelashes batting, mouths parting seductively for a kiss, perfect ‘O’s calling to the boys. They nearly fell into the makeshift screen, that dark cavern behind soft tongues. Around the campfires, they traded playing cards displaying women like those actresses: women’s full white breasts swelling toward the camera, legs spread to expose shaded triangles hidden beneath flared skirts. They joked this must’ve been American Nurse’s profession—acting in American films—before she entered the war and became a pawn of the imperialists, before she was separated from her battalion and ended up in their hands, in Deng’s.

  American Nurse became their possession, the Party headquarters in Beijing told them, for only a week before Deng decided what to do with her—whether or not she could return to the Korean side of the border or if she’d stay in Andong. They wanted to know everything about her and they devised stories as they squatted over the putrid earthen holes in the latrine, in the canteen over meals of rice congee.

  She must be a showgirl from New York City.

  I bet the cavern between her legs smells like the underbelly of a cow.

  Perhaps she’s a spy sent by the Americans listening to everything we say.

  “Maybe she’s Russian,” Fat Wang said one night as they watched American Nurse’s shadow falling asleep inside Deng’s tent; for the third night since Skinny Wang first saw her along the Yalu, she sat alone there, tied with hemp rope to a chair beside a gas lamp lit for their leader to read his daily dispatches from the capital. Deng said that most of all, he liked to smell her whenever he walked into his bunk. She smelled different from Chinese women. More like a Manchurian whore, he said. Jasmine petals and cinnamon sticks.

  Skinny Wang had never known Manchurian whores until he came to Andong—‘Peaceful City.’ This city felt foreign and not particularly at peace: the Yalu with its green-black depths said to swirl perilously high in spring and the brightly-painted women clustered like pigeons around parks, train stations, and public bathhouses with their whispers following you home, stinging your ears like winter air (Shall we dance, Comrade? Two yuan for a kiss of this virginal neck…).10

  They watched American Nurse while Deng was out “on assignment,” which really meant he was partaking in the local Manchurian fare, getting his fill of that smell—“untamed Dongbei pussy,” he assured the boys. They sat around a fire fashioned from twigs and unused food ration boxes. Across from them, American Nurse’s shadow hadn’t moved in minutes. They assumed she was sleeping. Skinny Wang imagined those women from the movies, felt himself running his hand along their cheeks, down their long, white necks. Aside from the films and the one-time grope of a classmate’s breast in his high school bathroom, he hadn’t any physical contact with women. As soon as he got too close to one, he was overwhelmed by the difference in odor—a woman never smelled as animal as a man; the female scent was more complex, like soil and sky, elements we see every day but still don’t understand inherently.

  Fat Wang passed a cigarette to Liu Xiaodong, the oldest of the troop and the comedian among them; Liu had been a police officer under the Nationalist regime and joined the Communists when they took over his hometown of Jilin. Having served under two governments, he knew how to work a bureaucracy. Even though he had the look of a clean-cut soldier, as soon as the cigarette was lit and held to his mouth, he became someone else: rougher, looser, frayed. Skinny Wang envied the ease with which Liu transitioned from youth to manhood and back again. Wang himself always felt too young, his hairless cheeks giving away his youth among this group of elder soldiers. Still, they respected his expertise, renaming him “Hawk Eye” for his ability to perfect a telescope’s view, for all the innate knowledge he had about glass grinding and lens shapes. Skinny Wang never told them about his father’s legacy, the hours the boy spent mirroring him on the grinding machine, bodies slumped, fingers blistered—personal histories had no place in these ranks.

  Comedian Liu elbowed Fat Wang. “Did you hear the one about the chickens in the north?”

  Skinny Wang expected a joke, but Liu’s eyes didn’t smile.

  Liu continued: “All over Zhen’an, the cocks are dropping to the ground like dead flies. Villagers say the Imperialists poisoned them, that the bastards are infiltrating our motherland’s food supply.” His shoulders raised with a fighting spirit as he flicked his cigarette into the fire, flames reaching to consume his discard. He waited for the sparks to disperse, for frowns to fade, then nodded toward the tent with a shrug and said: “I say we pay American Nurse a visit. She looks lonely.”

  Fat Wang di
dn’t respond. He kicked his pack of Panda cigarettes across the circle to Peng Lihai, the troop’s cartographer who left a pregnant wife at a grain farm in Shandong. Peng lit his cigarette, kicked the pack to Skinny Wang’s feet. Skinny Wang took the cue, struck a match and inhaled the resinous tobacco, letting it seep into his tongue. Smoking was another habit he picked up in Andong, along with gambling for food rations and pornographic playing cards. In Shanghai, cigarettes were expensive, smoked only by the highest party cadres or the street boys who stole from the army surplus at Little World. Skinny Wang exhaled. Smoke: it cleared his thoughts in a way nothing before ever could, made him forget his brother, who’d enrolled in shipbuilding school in Shanghai, allowed him to set aside memories of his father and uncles, no longer selling their illegal lenses and now living in the Zhejiang countryside where they reclaimed plots of land from before Liberation. He exhaled through his nose, relishing the slow nostril burn.

  As Skinny Wang pulled the cigarette to his mouth for another drag, Fat Wang stood over them, fists clenched but arms slack. “They killed our chickens, eh?” He nodded in Liu’s direction. “Time for revenge, I say. Let’s go, Hawk Eye.” His sweaty palm squeezed Skinny Wang’s shoulder. “Liu’s right. American Nurse looks lonely.”

  Skinny Wang shook his head, nodding at his cigarette.

  Liu kicked the butt out of his hand, squelched it with a toe. “Let’s go,” he said.

  When Skinny Wang looked up, Liu’s fat face was hungry. “Let’s go,” Liu repeated, using the plural ‘we’—zamen—the ‘we’ that didn’t allow retort, the ‘we’ Skinny Wang knew from a childhood in Shanghai, mindlessly following his brother’s every command like a dandelion seed caught on spring wind. But what if he’d known that taking that first step toward Deng’s tent would lead him down the slippery weasel’s hole of his life, years clambering for roots along the dark, precipitous fall into a cave of his own making? Who was he in that moment that he’ll never return to? Would he have stood there longer, head titled to an ambivalent moon, stars winking at him, all his ancestors up there watching—his mother too?—wishing for once he had the strength to stand in one place? But we don’t write our lives in hindsight. We write them under each beleaguered breath, by raising an arm, loosening a syllable from serpentine tongues. We write ourselves into being with the pen of our actions, the ink of our thoughts.11

  Skinny Wang sucked the remnant cigarette taste lingering in the air, made a tilted crack of his cervical spine, and, with Liu’s ‘zamen’ ringing in his ears, trailed his comrades into Deng’s tent. The men moved slowly and quietly, careful not to startle their commander’s possession. In the golden lamplight, American Nurse was a docile, sleeping goddess. Skinny Wang had never seen anything so beautiful and exotic; what surprised him most was how her skin was golden-pink, not white like the actresses he’d seen on screen.

  Fat Wang lifted American Nurse’s head off her chest with the back of his hand. Her eyes flashed open, wide and white, irises the patina of winter sky. Mo-gui—the devil’s eyes in Shanghai’s Xiang Gong Temple, the evening his brother left him there alone, telling him it would grow hair on his chest, under his arms. Not so—Skinny Wang’s underarms: ever bald as a baby’s head.

  American Nurse’s mo-gui eyes blinked. Liu ripped a swatch of cotton from his shirtsleeve then slid it across her chin in a makeshift gag. She stomped her foot. He prodded beneath the fabric to touch her lips then reached into her mouth, tracing her gums and teeth like a cartographer to map.

  “What you got down there?” he asked in mock adoration.

  She clamped her jaw.

  “Cunt!” he recoiled, blowing air onto his injured hand. The makeshift gag fell to the ground where American Nurse stomped on it. He pushed her over so her torso was still tied to the chair, legs free. She kicked his shins with a resilience Skinny Wang hadn’t seen since his mother elbowed the Nationalists who knocked down their door.

  “Be easy on her!” Peng said. He tried to help American Nurse back into the chair, but she slapped his hand and he flinched, stung by the refusal of assistance. The boys didn’t understand why she didn’t yield as easily as those actresses.

  Skinny Wang stood in the corner. How could he react? He’d learned long before this night that interfering in another man’s story only brings misery: like that midnight the Nationalists stormed through Cen Cang Yan carrying fire-lit sticks and breaking down the wooden doors as if they owned these homes. The young Wang cowered in the corner of his family’s cluttered pingfang, a child unable to open his mouth, lips glued stubbornly, heartbeat rising into his throat, eyes clenched. A soldier with a gnarled hand smacked his mother to the floor. His brother rose to protect her and was just as summarily knocked off his feet; he fell so hard he broke his arm. That night, the Nationalists ransacked the home, taking with them every possession but an old stool, its leg broken in the melee, and the silver thimble his mother shoved into her mouth when she heard the jeeps approaching, the same thimble now tucked into the chest pocket of Skinny Wang’s uniform.

  Peng danced, shaking off the unexpected slap, his knuckles colored the underbellies of seabirds.

  Fat Wang joined in: “You take her shoulders, Peng. Liu, peg her arms and I’ll handle her legs.”

  Just like that, Peng, Liu and Fat Wang stifled American Nurse’s movement like a fisherman strangling a freshly caught trout.

  “Hawk Eye!” Peng wrapped his arms around American Nurse’s upper body. “You grab her head.”

  Skinny Wang didn’t know what his comrades meant for him to do, but American Nurse’s hair was coiled at his feet like golden weeds, the curls sliding over the floor as she thrashed.

  Fat Wang pinned her legs with his knees. With a free hand, he reached down and unlatched his belt buckle. With his other hand, he removed a knife from a sheath beneath his waist. “Just give me a minute, boys.”

  American Nurse didn’t have a knife. Her legs, her best hope for running away, flopped limp.12

  From where Skinny Wang stood, even upside down, her face had an unkempt beauty like he’d never seen—long black eyelashes, pink cheeks, a round, smooth chin with a small dimple as if her mother pressed her thumb there when the girl was born and the indentation remained. Behind her ear was a scar, a thin, rosy sunrise. What accident caused this mark? Skinny Wang thought of the white-lit scenes of the Soviet movies they watched in the camp. Had she spilled from the door of an automobile on a wide highway? Been struck by a tree branch while horseback riding? Had her father beaten her with his ivory cane?

  “You’ll have your turn next,” Fat Wang said, as if reading Skinny Wang’s thoughts, only he’d misjudged the latter’s intention. How easily love is mistaken among rivals. Fat Wang smiled up at his skinny friend as he stood over American Nurse’s head, her mo-gui eyes shut. She didn’t want to see anymore; Skinny Wang understood why.

  Fat Wang’s pants were at his knees, exposing tight white underwear worn through to the dark crack of his ass. Although five years Skinny Wang’s elder, with pants like that, that grin on his face, he looked thirteen.

  “Go already,” Fat Wang said, nudging his comrade’s shin with his shoulder.

  Peng tugged on Skinny Wang’s sleeve. “Don’t worry, we’ll share.” His country boy’s smile lit the dark.

  Skinny Wang wanted nothing more than to run, but he couldn’t. He wanted to shake himself free and rise like the eastern sun above Andong’s purple hills, but instead, he sat outside the tent and reached for one of Peng’s last cigarettes. He wanted to race past the Manchurian factories with their smokestacks, leaving behind the black Yalu, the golden tents, American Nurse’s perfect pink cheeks, the cigarette smell on his fingers, the telescopes and their long beige barrels steadily pointing toward a distant shore that could look, at times, like a foggy dreamscape, almost within an arm’s reach, like its sands could be caressed with one’s trembling hand.

  But he sat outside the tent. He smoked the limp, tarry cigarettes. Waited for his turn in a game who
se rules he’d only begun to understand.

  Halfway through his second cigarette, after Fat Wang and Peng each, in sequence, emerged from the tent buckling their belts, a triumphant smile pulling at their lips, Liu did the same. When he returned, he walked with his chest puffed, lingering for only a moment to look at the darkened eastern sky, the Yalu’s silver crust, the snow-swathed hills of Korea. His fellow comrades looked outward with him, aware, if only for a brief moment, they were part of something much, much larger.

  “Your turn now,” he said, nudging Skinny Wang’s shin with his rubber-capped shoe. He gestured toward the cigarette but quickly nabbed the butt from Skinny Wang’s fingers and tossed it into the dust. “No time for that,” he said, his eyes shining a white hunger, breath visible. “A woman awaits.”

  Skinny Wang nodded, pressing into the cold earth to lift himself to standing. He shook blood into his legs, marveling at the body’s ability to go numb at even the slightest suggestion of rest, before following Liu’s path toward the tent, lifting the front flap just long enough for moonlight to swagger in, lighting his way.

  9. “You have to be careful where you step,” Li-Ming said. We circled manmade Rending Lake, only a few waltzing elderly clutching one another and dancing beneath the strange, metallic spires in the park’s center. Synthesized music blast from a public speaker. I looked down, ensuring my footing was stable. Li-Ming laughed. “I don’t mean literally,” she said. “I mean, you could walk right into the pig shit of history if you’re not careful.” I didn’t have a footing in history—being a teenaged American somehow made me feel exempt from history’s course even though my kind has been rewriting the world’s narratives for centuries.