Despite Xiaodong’s drifting mind, his flap-heavy tongue, Wang wanted to grasp his comrade’s hands. To tell him he’d once known hands as large as these. His mother’s, his father’s too—snapping corn husks to hang to dry along their pingfang’s slanted doorframe. In the last letter she sent, Li-Ming asked about Wang’s parents: Where were they? What had they studied in university? Wang casually avoided any mention of his family. His father hadn’t written in years. What was the point? Strange, he thought, how we share blood and yet feel so different. What ties us is an inevitable fate: everything about his parents’ lives was inexorably linked to his own—the way his inability to admit a certain truth about himself embroiled everyone around him in a tornado of likely tragedy.
Wang searched his knapsack for the last letter Li-Ming sent. In the sunlight skittishly waving through the cabin’s blinds, he held the letter to his eyes, blinking away a falling dusk.
“That wife of yours,” Xiaodong laughed. “You know what a wife is? A wife is a woman warm enough to heat the snake hidden beneath a beizi.”
“Bizui,” Wang said. Shut your mouth. “She’s not my wife.”
“Well, my mouth will be my old wife’s in two days time. Two days.” Xiaodong sighed and finally turned to acknowledge the world outside his window, a world that wasn’t theirs anymore—hills bathed in golden dusk, villages spilling brown-legged children along the tracks that click-clicked like the under beat to a folksong.
“In two days, Beijing will be nothing like you expect,” Wang said.
“The city needs to abandon its feudal ways. Those walls are useless in the face of new technologies—nuclear warfare would grind them to dust,” Xiaodong said.
“I think the city is fine as is,” Wang said. “Why do we need to demolish the city walls? They’re historic and make nice borders on a city map.”
“Do you not believe the Chairman’s proclamations about our nation’s great capital?” Xiaodong’s childish cheeks grew ruddy with contempt and confusion—an emotion Wang often noticed on faces of Party members, a look masking their deepest insecurity: that what the nation was embarking upon was in fact one giant ruse, the entire populace and its governing body moving as fast as they could toward a future they imagined in such glittering perfection, it could only exist within a man’s foolish mind. Past, present, future. Did it matter? They were just reinventing the angle from which they viewed a world they’d never comprehend. Surely the great Chairman himself knew this—which was why, Wang believed, he sent urbanites to the countryside: to give them a taste of their own humble beginnings. Or maybe it was to shake things up. Besides, routine comes with its own perils, namely, the inability to differentiate between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And also gossip. Frivolous talk thrives under boring circumstances. Does gossip exist in a war zone?
Xiaodong’s mustache twitched uncomfortably.
“Nothing will be as you expect it,” Wang said. “Uncertainty is the only certainty.”
“The poet returns,” Xiaodong scoffed.
“Yeah, the Poet.”
Xiaodong peeled Li-Ming’s letter from Wang’s fingers. “Another letter? More love poems? Shit, you’re one lucky husband.”
“We’re not married,” Wang reiterated, snatching the pages before Xiaodong could read the date and mock him for clinging to an old correspondence.
“Well, Poet, given your predilection for love letters, you might as well be married.” He lifted the shade just as the ancient city of Pingyao with its tall beige turrets rolled by. Wang learned about Pingyao in primary school, how it retained its city walls for thousands of years, despite the fact it was ruled by the Jin, the Zhou, the Qin, the Han, then the Ming and Qing. Even its city name had changed from ‘Ancient Tao’ to ‘Pingtao’ to ‘Zhongdu’ then finally to ‘Pingyao.’ This city, like Wang, had many nicknames, known as ‘Turtle City’ because its eastern and western walls have two gates each, giving the city the semblance of a turtle, four gates as legs. Their train sped past Ping Yao, once the financial hub of China’s silver trade, ignoring the time and space they’d need to fully comprehend its crumbling walls, how so many wished to conquer it from the outside.
After a stretch of golden fields, the train stopped in Taiyuan. On the platform, the usual groups of Red Guards clamored to board the already too-crowded train, swelling up the stairs with forgetful laughter and red books clutched fervently to their chests. Beneath Wang’s window, old ladies with marbled eyes shook wrinkled hands begging for food. Xiaodong ignored these pleas, contemplated the shape of an apple he’d pulled from his knapsack. He bit into the fruit with a loud, satisfied crunch.
Wang leaned back and held Li-Ming’s letter to the late day light pooling in from outside, knowing he had only a few minutes respite from Xiaodong’s pestering, only a few minutes of remaining daylight. What could he learn in this re-reading? He always sought a secret hidden behind Li-Ming’s colorful stories of her new life in Weifang. If Li-Ming couldn’t explain to him the truths of the world, who could?
Shangri-la, a song played over the loudspeakers in Taiyuan. Shandong in the winter is like a silver Shangri-la.
When the train peeled away from the station (gravity-stricken old lady faces wavering good-bye in the glass; old lady faces wanting Apples! Apples! Apples!), Wang heard Li-Ming’s voice warbling: Shandong in winter is like a silver Shangri-la.
The next morning, the train stopped in Shandong’s provincial capital, Jinan, where the men were to change to a northern-bound train to the Capital. They waited on the station’s busy platform for their next departure, breath fogging the chilled air. The eastern hills were dusted white, morning sun casting them opal. Beyond them, a silver Shangri-la.
Across the empty tracks, crowds of Red Guards milled about, dressed in Mao coats with the Chairman’s face beaming from a thousand red and gold buttons. They awaited an east-bound train headed for Shandong’s tip, the curved beak of their nation’s map—China: the thick-headed chicken. Chicken. Wang heard that familiar childhood taunt ringing in his head. Chicken. The chant of children on the schoolyard, of Wang’s sure-footed cousin as they ran clumsily down Shanghai’s rain-sodden alleyways toward the Park Hotel. Chicken. Without thinking, Wang slung his knapsack over his back and jumped over the steel tracks to the train that would lead him toward a silver Shangri-la.
“Little Brother Wang!” Xiaodong called over the whistling pitch of the eastward departing train, Wang’s hot water canteen still at his comrade’s feet. “Where are you going, Mr. Poet? You forgot your canteen!”
But it was too late. Wang was already digging into his pockets for his last five yuan, the only cash he’d saved from a year’s work in the fields. He was ignoring Xiaodong’s calls, ignoring any better judgment about abandoning his work unit and potentially ruining his chances for future work, let alone inspiring the prospect for a further character examination. He pushed past the crowds of Red Guards with their eager banter and tattered Little Red Books and onto the train that was slipping away as his foot stepped up the first stair. He wanted to see that silver Shangri-la with his own eyes. Li-Ming would greet him beneath the snow. They’d share a dance. She’d smile. Icicles would melt. He’d tell her the truth: who he really was. What her Poet had seen and known. They’d understand the dripping nuance of a shared, sheltered spring: .
As if approving his plan, the conductor smiled and slapped his back as he boarded the cabin for standing-room only ticket holders and found a place beside a hunched farmer, a burlap sack at the man’s feet filled with bruised apples. Of course, enough apples to feed the watering mouths of an entire train: without prompting, the farmer passed his bounty to the eager Red Guards who dug their teeth into the fruits with the mindlessness of well-fed horses. Outside, the mouths of Jinan’s beggars swelled with saliva, craving the sweetness the students casually discarded to the floor, browned cores rocking at their feet as the train pulled away from the station, edging its way toward the mountains, toward Weifang, Li-Ming’s Shangri-la.
*
Snow alighted delicately on Wang’s feet. Snow on the backs of his hands. Snow powdering his hair. Snow dripping winter tears into his eyes and down the long bridge of his nose. Snow. Weifang in winter. But Weifang in winter wasn’t anything like Gansu’s coldest months—the desert’s cutting wind that sliced your skin like a kitchen cleaver. No, Weifang’s winter melted you, softened your bones. Wang touched his cheek and laughed at the unexpected magic that brought him across the silver hills into Li-Ming’s Shangri-la—a steam locomotive chugging over the Taiyi mountain range until he could see the flat marshes leading all the way to the Yellow Sea, to Li-Ming, Worker #223 of the Shandong Soap Factory.
Waist-high snowdrifts were piled at the feet of unoccupied brick buildings, beside ping-pong tables too short to fight the rising white, games abandoned to the shifting of seasons. He knew she worked on the factory line for industrial-strength soap, the type strong enough to erase the grease and dirt from even the raisin villager’s hands. Sniffing at the cold air, Wang hoped to smell an undercurrent of jasmine, but all he received was the overwhelming constancy of burnt coal. From the quiet buildings beside him, smoke stacks emitted a constant plume of black snaking into the heavy white sky. Black on white.
Through this smoke, the snow continued falling. Even his footprints couldn’t follow as he walked the silent streets of this unknown city. The impending sense no one knew him here made him want to shout his presence:
I am here!
I am here for Huang Li-Ming!
I am here to take her home to Beijing with me!
But his voice froze within his throat, an air bubble in ice.
Wang followed the blanketed streets from the town’s central station into the city square, an empty gray expanse, toward the factories with their thin chimneys confidently spearing the sky. Wooden nianhua carvings with stories of the New Year still flapped, lonely, against the doors of two-story homes and shuttered office buildings. As Wang neared the row of factories on the southern side of the city, he passed a doorway atop which a rusted blue and white plaque announced a city office. The door was open, perhaps awaiting a visitor. He reached out to close it, keep in the warmth. But the door would not shut. A snowdrift inside held the door open. In piles, the shifting snow said: Welcome inside, Comrade Wang. He shoved the door wider, making enough room to enter.
“Ni hao,” Wang announced to the empty, shadowed room. No one responded. There was only a wooden desk overlooking a fogged window, a three-legged stool, and a gray microphone with a wire snaking through a hole cut in the wall, likely leading to a loudspeaker system through which the city heard important propaganda announcements. Wang switched on a small lamp on the desk, golden light orbing his hands, warming them enough to move, to begin what he came here to do.
“Li-Ming, your Wang Guanmiao is here to rescue you!” he shouted at the microphone. There wasn’t a reply. Was it on? He tapped but couldn’t hear the speakers reverberate outside the window. He laughed. The insanity of this journey! Was this anything but funny? But his laughter broke when it met the concrete walls of this small room, claustrophobic and kept. He pulled himself closer to the speaker system, sitting on the lone stool. A small red button beckoned. Press it, he told himself, summoning the courage to make his voice heard. Within seconds, the microphone crackled, inviting him to lean closer. His hot breath wet the metallic wiring. The wind rattled a suggestive tap tap tap on the wooden roof. The wind, too, wanted him to announce he’d come here to find Li-Ming, that he was ready to abandon his past and start a future with her.
“What now, Li-Ming?” he asked the wind.
A tapped reply: .
Shuo. To speak.
Wang pulled himself closer to the desk where a day-old People’s Daily was turned to the local news: a headline praising a ten-year old girl for reporting her teacher to the local bureau; he was a suspected capitalist who once tried to retain landed plots from before the war. The girl beamed at Wang from a black and white photograph.
“Proud of yourself?” he asked and she nodded, winked, pointed at her tight-lipped traitor teacher. He held his gloved hands to his mouth, blew warmly, inhaling the damp woolen smell. At least here he could decide what he’d say to Li-Ming when he found her leaving the factory floor at dusk, skipping toward the crowded cafeteria, her hands flashing white against the whitest snow. Her dancing could clear snow off streets, make rooftops shutter icicles onto unsuspecting walkways.
Just as he removed a pencil from his front pocket to scribble a speech on the back of the schoolgirl’s face, a bell rang. The chatter of a thousand voices shattered the snow’s silence, sharp female tones rising like shrieking magpie calls, men’s grumbling baritones.
Outside the window of his cramped perch, gray and brown clad bodies of thousands of freshly-emerged workers paraded the streets. Lunch! Their eager strides announced. Lunch. Stupid. Wang had forgotten about lunch. Without thinking, he reached for the record player next to the loudspeaker’s microphone. Slapping the stylus into place, he pressed the red button again to make an announcement, to change the course of what was quickly becoming a train speeding in the wrong direction. But what could he say?35 He didn’t know—but time, he knew, was important, irreplaceable. Time was words etched into caves. Books hidden under beds. The masses plodded through the snow toward the mess halls. Famished, skinny bodies the leanness of winter aspens. Where was his Li-Ming? To his astonishment, the record clicked into place. Familiar music blasted onto the streets.
At the first trembling notes, the bodies outside the window stopped to listen to that well-known voice, despite the years that passed since they’d first heard its warbling tones. She sung, honey-sweet:
This beautiful Shangri-la, this loveable Shangri-la
I deeply love this place… I love this place…
The syllables slid—xiang ge li la, xiang ge li la—rising, rising, then falling with the snow trapped on a swirling column of wind outside his window, incapable of touching down on the shoulders of still-warm workers.
Unexpectedly, the bodies outside formed pairs, danced a waltz Wang witnessed only once (whose memory?: fogged windowpanes, high-heeled shoes, bodies floating across a ballroom’s waxed wooden floors, the low drone of trumpets). They leaned and swayed in the wind, puffed torsos padded by the weight of matching winter parkas. Snow lifted into swirls above their heads, drifted in waves beneath their feet. Numb toes tapped beats, heads swayed. Wang stood at the window watching, his own body inspired by the rhythm of the dancers, their lilting turns and patient, contented smiles. He traced their tree-like shapes on the frosted glass, against the fog of his breath. Their movements were rehearsed yet instinctive—Wang was reminded of his first day on the grinder, how his fingers didn’t hesitate to find the shape of the lens.
He hugged the ghostly body in his arms, held it so close her breath warmed his shoulder, made his hips sway. Then, just as suddenly, he felt the cold wind of a body removed from his grip and a return to this body, this earth. A face pressed its cheek against the window. A face Wang recognized. Had been longing to see for years. Warbled glass, the blues of water-logged eyes and the blacks of eyelashes batting snowflakes. Behind this face was the tempered jaw of a face he’d known before that. And then, behind that, layer-upon-layer of faces that once stood pressed to panes of glass, masked by his own incapacity to see the borders of chins, the true shape of rouged cheeks. He saw people he hadn’t yet met—Li-Ming’s round-faced friends, the bicycle repairman on the corner of Jishuitan—and then, the past too: Smiley’s figure on the cliff, his ragged pants slapping at thin legs, Commander Deng’s shadow shrouded by a tent’s khaki shield, Uyghurs lounging outside a restaurant he didn’t recognize but knew, with a strange and certain insistency, he’d one day come to pass every day on his way to an office where his work station faced a courtyard and the courtyard was filled with aspens that only in spring would drop seeds to earth like snow. Nose pressed against windowpane, Wang knew the cold winter on
that tip of smudged skin, shared with it this desire to be warm, to clutch a body, be swaying along to the xiang ge li la li la li la li la li la li la li la of an imagined youth.
Sparks flew from beneath the glass, sprayed white piles outside the window with hot blue-silver.
“Comrade Wang,” a voice said. A voice belonging to a hand that gripped his shoulder. Tightly. Fraternally. “Comrade Wang, collect your things and stop dreaming. Our dreams have come true: We’re home, you ass.”
His nose was pressed into the window, breath masking the familiar red-gold street lights flickering into view, bright orbs illuminating empty streets. Nearly midnight, the capital city was covered in the dry snow he’d despised, dandruff-like flakes that powder shoulders and get stuck in the creases of shirtsleeves. Wang cursed himself for what would prove to be a string of cowardice—Had he never gotten off the train? Where was his shining Shangri-la?
An announcer cleared his throat into the train’s loudspeaker: “Beijing,” he said. “Passengers alighting here, ready your belongings for arrival.”
Wang took several minutes to pack his canteen, his Tang dynasty poetry books, two worm-ridden apples, and Li-Ming’s letters, tied with a fraying hemp string, into his knapsack. But it took him much longer to feel the earth land heavily underfoot as he stamped clusters of freshly-fallen snow from his boots on the station’s platform. Took him much longer to shake the feeling of his nose pressed to the glass, the strange faces he knew so well yet couldn’t name, the chill on his cheeks like a once-familiar word now forgotten. It took him even longer to turn to witness his large-footed tracks disappearing with each new layer of snow, as if reminding him that by turning back to witness, he would wash away any trace, any resemblance, of the path home.
Empire of Glass Page 18