Inheritance

by Lan Samantha Chang

  Beneath my nods and responses, a strategy was churning in my mind. Keeping my eyes on his, I made my lips into an O and blew over its shining surface. His face wavered in the steam that rose from my cup.

  “When we moved to Hangzhou,” he said, “my mother had me write a letter to your mother explaining she was watching over Yinan and Yao. She hoped that it would bring your mother solace.”

  My mother had said nothing of this. “She has a big house,” I said, defending her. “She doesn’t need solace.”

  “That’s not what my mother thinks.”

  I placed my hands around my teacup, seeking reassurance in its warmth. “What does your mother think?”

  He raised his chin, watching me. “That true value in life comes from knowing that you’ve been generous to others. That possessions have no meaning when you cut yourself off from others.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know. I do know that I’m not interested in being rich.”

  What was the nature of this battle? Somehow during our conversation, the air between us had thickened and begun to glitter. I recalled the autumn sun shining through willow leaves, letting in sparkles of bright autumn sky. We had been children then.

  “How is Yao?” I asked.

  “He’s growing. His face is changing; he looks like your mother. Sometimes he looks a little like your sister.”

  This remark took me by surprise. “Do you even remember Hwa?”

  “I’ve seen her in Shanghai.” Hu Ran looked into his cup. “I saw her with Weiwei, once—maybe she was on the way to a friend’s house. That’s how I thought to find Weiwei and give her a note for you.”

  “You’ve been to Shanghai before?”

  “Dozens of times.”

  “Have you seen me before?”

  He looked away. “Well—” He paused. “I went by the house. After I saw Weiwei and Hwa. I saw your lamp once. At least I think it was yours, in the left upstairs window. Everyone else had gone to bed. I thought you might be reading, the way Yinan does—or studying for school. You remind me of her, somehow. Not in the face.”

  I said nothing in reply, drawn into this notion. A tremor spread down my spine; the terror had been dormant, waiting in my blood.

  I wanted to run. Instead I kept my face polite. We conversed a little more, in a desultory way, until I said that it was time for me to go.

  Hu Ran took a breath. “Do you want to meet again next week?”

  “Sure.”

  “What will you tell your mother?”

  This question brought me up short. I looked into his dark eyes not revealing their color.

  “I’ll say I’m going for a walk with Pu Li,” I said. “She approves of Pu Li.”

  I knew that I had won.

  Hu Ran insisted on paying the bill. Due to steep inflation, he had brought his money in a heavy shoulder bag. Together we left the coffee shop. It was that time of evening when the sun seems to pause in its trail across the sky before pushing in one last quick pulse to end the day. This moment never seems as terribly still as at that time of year, with the last red embers of the winter sky disappearing into dusk. We walked for some time. My fingertips were cold, and I knew that I should find a bus. I saw it coming up the street, but moved toward it reluctantly. I did not want to go home. I didn’t want to see my mother’s starved face and stony eyes when I felt so powerful, so alive.

  THAT NIGHT WHILE I sat brushing my hair, Hwa knocked on my door. Before Shanghai, we’d always shared a room, but now my mother said we must get used to living the way that we were meant to live. Now we had separate rooms, necessitating formal visits. It was a curious business. Hwa stood in the doorway, slender and insistent. I let her in; she closed the door, another curious business. I told her I was going to see Hu Ran again the following week. She sat firmly on the bed.

  “Are you in love?” she demanded. “Do you love him?”

  I hadn’t expected her question and couldn’t answer it immediately.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Hwa shifted to one slender foot. “How do you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Know when you love someone.”

  I might have said the truth: that I didn’t know myself. I could have turned away and waited for her to leave. But there was tautness in her voice, as in a stretched rope. It made me wish to comfort her. “Of course you know,” I said. “You’ve seen Mama, the way she feels for Baba.”

  Hwa said nothing.

  “You know what you feel for Willy Chang,” I tried again.

  Hwa’s lips tightened. “Don’t talk about Willy.”

  I turned toward the mirror. I saw a slender girl with a face of oval gold, wearing loose white pajamas lit like wings in the glow of the light. I was not beautiful in the way of my mother, whose face, even in aging, held the delicate, still symmetry of intricately folded rice paper. But I was vivid and alive. Behind me stood Hwa, prim, her mouth pinched shut. She was fair, tensile, alert; soon she would also be pretty.

  “No,” Hwa said suddenly. “I don’t want to be under anyone’s power.” Her eyes burned.

  IT WOULD NOT happen to me, either. I wouldn’t be like my grandmother, my mother, or my aunt. I could run from it, as Hwa was doing, or I could control it. If I kept hold of my own power, then no one could ever hurt me.

  Hu Ran was staying in the Y, in a tiny room with a small window and unpainted walls. There was nowhere to sit but on his mattress. I sat down. He stood awkwardly. I took his wrist and pulled until he sat next to me.

  Since my time in the bomb shelter, I had been reluctant to touch. I couldn’t forgive my mother’s silent fury, nor the ruthlessness and suffering that lay beneath it. Now Hu Ran and I were close enough to smell each other’s breath. His nearness affected me like an illness. There, in the airless little room, a physical emotion was invading my senses like a rolling fog. I had a sudden need to put my hand on his bare throat. I reached through the fog and felt his solid pulse through my fingertips.

  “Make love to me.”

  “No,” he said. “I should keep you out of trouble.”

  I shrugged. “I want to do it.”

  “I feel responsible.”

  “That’s xingyi,” I said. “The loyalty of servants.”

  He winced. I smiled. “Young miss—”

  “Stop calling me ‘young miss.’”

  “Hong,” he said, angry. Then, more quietly, “Hong.”

  Once more, I reached through the fog and put my hand on his face. “Kiss me.”

  “Hong, this is a bad idea.”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  He looked away. “Of course I do.”

  I felt a tingling in my hands. “Do it,” I said, “or I’ll tell my mother you’ve done it anyway.”

  He reached for me angrily. His lips were very soft.

  I slid my hand between the buttons of his shirt and felt the pounding of his furious heart. We held each other hard but couldn’t bring each other close enough; we struggled with some unseen thing inside of us, between us. I pushed myself against him, harder and harder. I wanted to forget the terror in my blood; I wanted to journey into darkness. But it seemed to me, as we embarked upon this trip that had been waiting since we were children, that I grew more radiant and powerful than any woman had been before me. My fingertips could feel the finest differences of touch; my eyes could see through his skin; and some other sense more powerful than vision echoed through me. I could sense around our room the city in flames. The streets were turning upside down. China burned. Rulers fell away and towers crumbled. Rolling water swirled in from the sea. Through this chaos, I followed those who’d gone ahead of me: my grandmother, my mother, my father, and Yinan. I followed them hoping to belong inside the world they h
ad made.

  HE HAD BEEN TRAVELING IN DELIRIUM THROUGH AN indeterminate time, and he struggled out on frail legs, squinting in the light. He was aware of having escaped something, of having survived.

  As soon as Junan arrived, he knew that he must leave Chongqing. He asked for an assignment, hoping to be gone long enough for everyone to forget what he had done. He didn’t know how it might end. He only knew he wished to act, to finally see combat and put to rest a sense of uselessness, of shame.

  But as he prepared to leave the city he could not shake the suspicion he’d forgotten something. Soon he would fly over the mountains lacking some crucial item, something that might save him, something he would miss. He asked Junan to check over her list. She went through his luggage, including vitamins and quinine pills, and assured him that not a thing was missing. As his departure neared, he knew what it was that lay unfinished. On his last day in Chongqing he went to the American woman’s house.

  It was that time of winter when the cold deepens but the days grow longer. The smell of burning coal flavored the air. Yinan opened the door wearing a heavy sweater, her body obscured and muffled in the bulky gray wool. At least her skin was clear, her hair was clean. She appeared well and even plump, although it seemed to him, observing her shuttered gaze, that she wasn’t happy to see him. Without a word, she led him into the front room. There were heavy cushioned chairs and walnut furniture. Bookshelves sagged beneath countless English and Chinese volumes held into place with elephant bookends. The room smelled of books, furniture polish, and an indefinable Caucasian scent.

  Yinan sat with her heels together, plain and proper as a girl who’d been sent to a nunnery. He had forgotten her silences. He didn’t want to stare at her, and so he looked away, but it seemed to him that the mere glimpse of her had brought him back into the dark. It was as if they sat in a lightless room where he could only sense her body in the chair and know by touch her narrow face with the faint scar on the forehead. He could almost feel between his fingertips the heavy strands of hair against her neck.

  “I’m leaving,” he said finally. “I’m going off to the war. I wanted to say goodbye.”

  She nodded.

  “What happened—it was all my fault. I was lonely, I had been alone for so long. Nobody will blame you.”

  She sat as still as one waiting for an answer from Guan Yin.

  “If you would come back to your family this would all be well again—your sister would understand. I am sure she would forgive you.”

  “Please, Li Ang,” she said, “please consider what you feel.”

  She was also searching in the dark, feeling for his heart with gentle fingers. He couldn’t bear to know what she might find.

  He said, “You belong with them for now. Later, you can still be married.”

  At this, she gazed at him sadly as if she were indeed his sister and knew him truly as a sister might. She saw through his haze of activity and plans. He could tell from her expression that she knew, without judgment or doubt, that he was lost.

  “I can’t go back,” she said. “I love you.”

  “Stop.” Li Ang held up his hand.

  “We mustn’t see each other anymore,” she said.

  HE LEFT CHONGQING and abandoned himself to the soundless, rushing wind of luck. The following years have been left out of his stories. I know only that his luck held out as he struggled to adapt. Pu Sijian helped him. Many times he regretted his decision to go to the front, but soon his own troubles were engulfed by a much larger and more desperate battle.

  In December 1941, when the enemy at last attacked America, people celebrated in the streets, believing the Americans would crush Japan and bring the war to a quick end. But the U.S. needed to prepare, and as the long winter wore on, it grew clear that Chongqing was now vulnerable from the south. The British empire was failing. Singapore fell. Japan then assaulted Burma, perilously close to the supply line of the Burma Road. My father’s division was one of many sent to Burma under the American General Joseph Stilwell. The early spring of 1942 found his regiment holding down the city of Toungoo, almost surrounded by the Japanese advance.

  Over the years I’ve often tried to envision it: the line of Chinese soldiers stretched over the central country’s hills and forests, in the midst of gunfire and of villages in flames. Japanese planes flew overhead. My father was a tiny dot on this map, smaller than a stone on a go board. And perhaps my father saw himself as a playing piece on an enormous game, under mountains crouching over them like huge men.

  My father walked and slept and fought. He shot at shadows, bushes, animals, and men. More than once he killed a man. And yet every skirmish they were pushed back, they ran for cover from the planes that strafed them. They woke, pissing in their pants, to gunfire; they vomited with exhaustion and fear. The enemy used tanks and superior rifle power. Over the weeks they lost a mile, twenty miles, forty miles. Where were their reinforcements? He heard the rumor that three more divisions, including the 38th with Sun Li-jen, were behind him, but his old commander was a hundred miles away, awaiting confirmation of orders from the Generalissimo. They might have been as far away as the moon. Chiang was unwilling to sacrifice more of his best troops. My father’s regiment had been given up for lost, and soon the few who remained would be run up into the hills.

  The Burmese, angry after years of British rule, were not sorry to see them go. Some of them led the Japanese convoys along dirt roads, secret roads, and attacked the regiment from the rear. And so they lost Toungoo; around that time they heard the British had left Prone to their west. They lost Pyinmana. By early April, Mandalay was burning. Only the palace of kings was standing, glowing in the firelight. By mid-April, the British were in retreat, destroying precious oil fields as they went. The sky was filled with smoke and flames, the chattering of frightened monkeys. Li Ang’s hair was permeated with the stink of oil and corpses.

  Once he was shocked awake by engines whining overhead. He bolted from his tent in his bare feet and took shelter in the trees. There he saw General Chou Gaoyao running toward him. Not twenty feet away, Chou jerked suddenly and thumped to the ground like a sack of rice. That night, Chou was burned and his cremated remains were given to his cousin, Chou Tuyao, to carry back the family. Colonel Kwang was promoted in Chou’s place. Kwang was the upright man who’d married Hsiao Meiyu; he was now the father of an infant daughter. He showed remarkable courage, leading the remains of their brigade against a Japanese brigade of twice their number. But soon it was over. To their east, the Japanese broke through the Allied line. Enemy troops cut off retreating Allied soldiers, and Li Ang’s regiment was scattered to the winds.

  Those who still remained began the long retreat to China. They loaded everything they could onto the few discarded British jeeps. They brought weapons and water. Behind them, the Japanese pressed on.

  ONE BRIGHT, WARM morning in early spring they reached a bridge. The enemy was behind them; and before them, all around them, fled the refugees: peasants, farmers, shopkeepers. The two lanes of the bridge were dark with them.

  General Mao was in command of the retreat. Li Ang went with him to view the scene, and they stood wordless for some time. They saw two empty cars abandoned in the middle of the bridge, hindering the steady flow of human traffic. The refugees walked slowly toward safety with their precious burdens: an old tin trunk; a wooden duck; an enormous bundle of dirty muslin. The warm air clung, motionless and thick with the odor of human bodies. Li Ang turned and looked toward Burma. As he stood against the moving crowd, bumping shoulder after shoulder, meeting face after face, some weeping, some intent, some expressionless, Li Ang began to feel a restlessness akin to claustrophobia. It was the density of the crowd and its silence. No one had the strength to speak. There was an unnatural absence of conversation; only exhortations— “Faster,” “Over here,” or sudden shouts, orders.

  He turned bac
k to face the bridge. His thigh was met by a taut rope. He stumbled and would have fallen but for the refugees surrounding him.

  He realized he’d walked into a rope that stretched between a mother and her son who were heading in the opposite direction, toward Burma.

  “Watch it!” said the boy. His voice rang out, a bright note of ferocity in that unnatural hush.

  Li Ang met his gaze. The boy was wiry and undersized, perhaps ten years old, with a skinny face and triangular, observant eyes. He wore his hair cut short, exposing his greenish scalp. The tired mother wore a pink headscarf. He noted their empty bags and understood that they traveled across the river each day to sell items to the hordes of people who had made it to the other side. Then they would return, only to cross again with more goods, tied together at the waist to keep from losing each other in the crowd.

  “What’s this?” said Mao, behind him. “Keep going.”

  Li Ang turned sideways to make a path around the mother and son.

  “Over there,” Mao shouted. He pointed to their right, where the crowd had eddied. Li Ang struggled toward the pocket of empty space.

  “We have to blow it up,” Mao shouted. He spat and waited for Li Ang’s reply. “We have to wait until the enemy has arrived—perhaps even while they’re crossing—and dynamite it: blow it up.”

  Li Ang said, “But the bridge will still be crowded with civilians.”

  “You think we can invite them to cross first? Send for Chang.”

  Chang was a very small man—Li Ang could barely see him approaching in the crowd—but he was quick and good with guns and explosives. He sent his men to dynamite the bridge, putting the trigger at the checkpoint on the Chinese side.