by Ha Jin
That sounded familiar. Then it hit Gary that those words were part of a code for initiating contact. He responded according to the script, “Your kidneys must be weak. Herbal medicine might help.”
“What kind would you recommend?” Meng asked calmly.
“Six-flavor boluses.”
“How many should I take?”
“Two a day, one in the morning and one in the evening.”
A knowing smile emerged on Meng’s face. Gary’s heart began thumping as he was convinced that this man in the Nationalist army’s uniform was an agent working for the mainland. With practiced casualness Gary looked around and saw two American officers eating a few tables away, but they didn’t understand Mandarin.
“Brother”—Meng leaned in—“I know you meet prisoners every day. The boss wants you to get hold of the photos of the die-hard anti-Communists among them.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but they all go by aliases,” Gary said.
“We know that. That’s why we need their pictures.”
“When should I give you the goods?”
“I’ll return to Taipei soon. You should contact Hong Kong to see how to deliver them.”
“Using the old communication channel?”
“Correct.”
That was their only meeting, and Meng left Pusan three days later. Gary continued to join the U.S. officers in interrogating the Chinese POWs. He was respected by his colleagues for knowing some of the prisoners’ dialects and for understanding their psychology. In the beginning he had sympathized with those POWs who still had unhealed wounds, but he was jaded by now. Some prisoners would weep wretchedly like small boys and beg the UN officers to send them to Generalissimo Chiang’s army in Taiwan. Some kept complaining about being bullied by others, particularly by their prison-compound leaders, handpicked by their captors. Some remained reticent, only repeating, “I want to go home.” A few, the minute they sat down, would curse their interrogators and even call Gary “the Americans’ running dog.” There was a fellow, his face and limbs burned by napalm, who would make a strange noise in response to the interrogators’ questions, and Gary couldn’t tell whether he was giggling or hissing or crying. One of his eyes never blinked; maybe it was already sightless. The files on the POWs were messy because the prisoners would frequently change their names, also because they were often regrouped in different prison units. And no staffer would take the trouble to set the files in order, everybody being overwhelmed with the work he had to do.
A number of POWs were leaders within the prison compounds and worked hard to persuade others to desert the Communist ranks. These men were quite obedient to the Americans and eager to curry favor with the prison administration. Whenever possible, Gary would strike up conversations with them, sharing cigarettes or candy or peanuts. He learned from them the calisthenics that the Chinese army had designed for its soldiers. He found many of these men using names different from those in their files. The prison administration wouldn’t bother to straighten this out, or perhaps even encouraged them to adopt aliases as a disguise. Occasionally Gary would take a photo with one of those men as “a keepsake.” Whenever it was possible, he’d bring their files back to his room, which he shared with an officer who’d always go out in the evenings. With his German camera Gary shot photos of some anti-Communists’ files and kept a list of their names with cross-references to their current aliases.
When his Pusan stint was over, in late October, he returned to Okinawa with six films of the prisoners’ files and resumed his work as a translator at the agency. He could have had the photos developed, but that might be too risky, so he put the films into a cloth pouch and tied its neck with a shoelace. He wrote to Hong Kong, to the old address, a Baptist seminary, which he’d been told to use in case of emergency.
To Gary’s delight, Bingwen Chu wrote back two weeks later, saying in the voice of a fake cousin that Gary’s family in the countryside was well and missed him, and the two of them should spend some time together in Hong Kong in February. As for the “medicine,” Gary should go to Tokyo as soon as possible and deliver it to “a friend” there, who was an overseas Chinese. Bingwen provided the man’s address in Shibuya district and described him as “a short, thickset fellow with a balding head and a Sichuan accent.” Gary wondered why Bingwen and he couldn’t meet somewhere in Japan. Then he realized that few Chinese agents, unable to speak a foreign tongue and unfamiliar with the life and customs of another country, would dare to undertake a mission in an environment where they had little control. This realization made him smile with a modicum of complacence, feeling he must be quite outstanding compared to his comrades back home, perhaps one in a thousand. Like his American colleagues who often went to the capital on weekends, he took a three-day leave, flew to Tokyo, and delivered the intelligence without incident.
Minmin and I started out for Maijia Village early the next morning. Once we got out of Linmin Town, I was amazed to see that most of the country roads were well paved, some new. The villages and small towns in this area seemed all connected by decent roads, though the asphalt was often littered with animal droppings. The drive was pleasant; there was little traffic at this early hour. We passed an immense reservoir fringed with reeds and sparkling in the sunlight, and then some wheat fields appeared, the stalks, their heads just developing, swaying a little in the breeze. Approaching Maijia Village, we saw a pond to our right, in which flocks of white ducks and geese were paddling. An old woman, a short sickle in her hand, was sitting on the bank, tending the fowl. We pulled up. As we stepped out of the car, she cackled, “Goosey, goosey, qua qua qua.” We went over and asked her where the village chief’s home was.
She pointed to the slanting columns of cooking smoke in the east and said, “There, beyond those houses. His home has red tiles on top.”
We thanked her and drove over.
The village head was a man around fifty, with a strong build and large smiling eyes. He introduced himself as Mai after I said I was Weimin Shang’s daughter and Minmin was my student. He seemed pleased to see us and asked his wife to serve tea. Seated on a drum-like stool in his sitting room with his ankle rested on his opposite knee, he told me that there were still more than a dozen Shang households in the village, but none of them was my father’s immediate family. “Weimin Shang’s parents died and his wife moved away,” Mai said. “Nobody’s here anymore.”
For a moment I was too flummoxed to continue, my nose became blocked, and I had difficulty breathing. Mai went on to say that because of a famine, Yufeng had left the village in the early 1960s for the northeast, where her younger brother had emigrated.
“Who knows?” Mai resumed. “Perhaps it was smart of her to leave. After the three years of famine came all the political movements, one after another, endless like all the bastards in the world. Your father’s situation was a mystery to us. There were some rumors that said he’d taken off to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek, and some people heard he had died in a labor camp somewhere near Siberia. So if Yufeng hadn’t left, she might’ve become a target of the revolution. There was no telling what might happen to her.”
“Is there a way I can find her contact information?” I asked.
“Matter of fact, a cousin of your dad’s is still around. He must know something about her whereabouts.”
“Can you show me where he lives?”
“Sure thing, let’s go.”
Mai stood and we followed him out. Without extinguishing his cigarette butt, he dropped it on a manure pile in his yard. He said we could leave the car behind because we were going to walk just a few steps. I was unsure about that, but Minmin felt it was all right. “It’s an old car anyway,” she said. Together we headed toward the southern side of the village. It was quiet everywhere, and on the way all I saw were two dogs slinking around; they were so underfed that their ribs showed and their fur was patchy. The street was muddy, dotted with puddles of rainwater, some of them steaming and bubbling a little as if about to boil
. There was trash scattered everywhere—instant noodle containers, glass bits, shattered pottery, rotten cabbage roots, candy wrappers, walnut shells, paper flecks from firecrackers that looked like the remnants of a wedding or funeral. A whiff of burning wood or grass was in the air and a few chimneys were spewing smoke.
We stopped at a black brick house behind an iron-barred gate, which Mai, without announcement, pushed open and led us in. The instant we entered, two bronze-colored chickens took off. One landed on a straw stack while the other caught a top rail of the pigpen, both clucking and fluttering their feathers. An old man was weaving a mat with the skins of sorghum stalks in the cement-paved yard. At the sight of us he tottered to his feet, his gray beard scanty but almost six inches long. Mai explained that I was Weimin Shang’s daughter from Beijing. At that, the old man’s eyes lit up and his mouth hung open. He turned away and whispered something to his wife, a large-framed woman with a knot of hair at the back of her head. He then said to me, “This is my wife, Ning.”
“Very glad to meet you, Aunt Ning. I’m Lilian.” I held out my hand, but she drew back a bit, then gingerly shook my hand, her palm rough and callused.
“Welcome,” she mumbled.
“Come on, Weiren,” Mai said to the old man. “Don’t keep us standing like this.”
So the host led us into the sitting room, which was also a bedroom. A large brick bed, a kang, took up almost half the space. On the whitewashed wall hung a glossy calendar that displayed the Golden Gate Bridge, and next to the picture was a garland of dried chilies, a few of them fissured, revealing the yellow seeds. Minmin went over to the picture of the bridge and blurted out, “Wow, this is gorgeous. Do you know where this is?” As soon as she said that, she bit the corner of her lips as if to admit a gaffe in assuming the host’s ignorance.
Mai laughed while Uncle Weiren smiled, showing that only three or four teeth were left in his mouth. “Sure I know,” the host said. “It’s in the American city called Old Gold Mountain.” That’s the Chinese name for San Francisco.
Aunt Ning came in holding a kettle and served tea while Uncle Weiren offered us Red Plum cigarettes. Mai took one; Minmin and I declined. I lifted the mug and sipped the tea, which had a grassy flavor. The old man told me that his name, Weiren, meant he and my father were cousins. In other words, he was a real uncle of mine. All the males of their generation in the Shang clan had the same character, wei, in their personal names.
“I’m your grandpa’s nephew,” he added. “Your father and I are cousins.”
“Do you remember my dad, Uncle Weiren?” I asked.
“You bet. He taught me how to dog-paddle when I was a little kid. I knew your first mother pretty well too. She was a kindhearted woman and once gave me a full pocket of roasted sunflower seeds.” He was referring to Yufeng. Traditionally a man’s children by his second and third wives also belonged to his first wife, who was the younger generation’s “first mother.”
“Where is Yufeng now? Do you know?” I said.
“In the northeast. Your sister used to write me at the Spring Festival, but her letters stopped coming after a couple of years.”
“Why did they have to leave?” I asked. I had been plagued by the question for a long time. “Didn’t the government provide for them?”
Uncle Weiren sighed, then took a deep drag on his cigarette. “They used to send her your dad’s pay every month, but money became worthless during the famine. Rich or poor, folks all starved, and only the powerful had enough food.”
“By docking others’ rations,” Mai said.
I asked Uncle Weiren, “But didn’t my grandparents leave Yufeng some farmland?”
“Their land was taken away long ago, in the Land Reform Movement in the early fifties. Since then, all land belongs to the country.”
“I see. So there was no way Yufeng could raise her kids here?”
Uncle Weiren stared at me, his bulging eyes a little bleary. He cleared his throat and said, “It was hard for her indeed. Your brother died of brain inflammation, but it was also believed he starved to death. All the Shangs in the village got angry at Yufeng, because the boy was the single seedling in your father’s family. The old feudalistic mind-set, you know, that doesn’t allow girls to carry on the bloodline. It wasn’t fair to Yufeng really. She was an unfortunate woman, alone without a man in her home. How could she raise the kids by herself? To make things worse, your brother was weak from the day he was born. The Shangs here were all upset about his death, and some blamed Yufeng for it, but every family was too desperate to give her any help. It was not like nowadays, when we can afford to spare some food or cash.”
“About a third of our village died in the famine,” Mai said. “I remember wild dogs and wolves got fat and sleek feeding on corpses.”
“That’s awful,” Minmin put in.
“So you drove Yufeng out of the village?” I asked Uncle Weiren, bristling with sudden anger.
“It didn’t happen like that,” the old man said. “She had a younger brother who was a foreman or something on a state-owned farm in the northeast. He wrote and said there was food in the Jiamusi area, so he wanted her to come join his family there. It was generous of him to do that. Also good for Yufeng.”
“Especially when she was of no use to the Shangs anymore,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean. Lots of bachelors would eye her up and down whenever they ran into her. Many would whistle and let out catcalls. Even some married men wanted to make it with her. She was a fine woman, good-looking and healthy enough to draw a whole lot of attention. Some wicked men even tried to sneak into her house at night. Your father hadn’t been around for such a long time, we didn’t know whether he was dead or alive, so the village treated her more or less like a widow.”
“Did she marry again in the northeast?” I asked.
“That I don’t know. Truth to tell, I respected her. She was a good woman and had a sad, sad life.”
Mai broke in, “My mom used to say that any man should feel blessed if he could have a wife like Yufeng. Folks really looked up to her. She had dexterous hands and made the thinnest noodles in the village. She could embroider gorgeous creatures like a phoenix, mandarin ducks, peacocks, and unicorns. Lots of girls went to her house to learn embroidery from her.”
“Do you still have her address, Uncle Weiren?” I asked.
“I might’ve kept a letter from her daughter. Let me go check.” He stood, pushed aside a cloth door curtain, and shuffled into the inner room.
I turned to Mai. “Doesn’t Uncle Weiren have children?”
“He has a son and a daughter. Both are in Dezhou City and doing pretty well. The daughter teaches college there.”
“So most of the Shangs are doing all right?”
“You bet. Yours is a clan that always valued education and books and has produced a good many officials and scholars. The Shangs have been respected in this area for hundreds of years.”
That was news to me. Uncle Weiren came back and handed me a white envelope, partly yellowed with damp. As I took out a pen to copy the address, he stopped me, saying I could keep the letter. I thanked him and put it into my pocket. We went on conversing about the other Shang families in the village, some of whom were rather well-off now. I told them I was living and working in Beijing, though I’d grown up overseas, having a white mother. Minmin and I exchanged glances, her eyes rolling as if to assure me that she wouldn’t breathe a word about my American citizenship. Such a revelation would only have complicated matters, drawing officials and even the police to the village, so I’d better let them assume I was a Chinese citizen and had lived in China for many years. I said my father had remarried because the Party wanted him to start another family abroad. When I told them that he had died in America long ago although he’d planned to retire back to China, they fell silent and didn’t raise another question.
I learned that my grandparents’ graves were outside the village. “Can I go and pay my respects to them
?” I asked Uncle Weiren.
He appreciated the gesture, so we two set out with a shovel, a bunch of incense sticks, and a basket packed by Aunt Ning. Mai left for home, saying he had a business meeting; he owned two chicken farms and planned to start another one. Minmin went with him to fetch her car. She would stay behind to rest some since Uncle Weiren and I would soon come back for lunch. We were walking east and passed a poplar grove partly swathed in haze, some of the boles glowing silver in the sunlight and some of the leaves still damp with dew. Uncle Weiren told me that poplars had been in fashion in recent years because the trees were hardy and, fond of sandy soil, they grew fast (they can be ready for felling in eight or nine years), and the timber could bring a good price. Many families in the village had cleared patches of wild land and planted them with poplars. An acre could produce more than two hundred trees. Uncle Weiren had two acres of them, which was a virtually risk-free investment after the saplings had survived the first winter and spring. Once his poplars grew up and he sold the timber, he planned to expand his house to two stories. As long as the Party didn’t change its current agricultural policies, he felt that the country folks’ livelihood might improve some. In spite of my skepticism, I didn’t contradict him. I had read that some poor families in the countryside couldn’t pay taxes and abandoned their homes.
I didn’t see a single child, and only a few middle-aged men and women greeted Uncle Weiren. When I asked him why there were so few children in the village, he said that all the young people had left to work in the cities and would come back only once a year, mostly at the Spring Festival. People didn’t want to raise many children anymore, especially those young couples who already had a son. The one-child policy was still in place, but you might have more children if you were willing to pay heavy fines. “It costs too much to bring up kids,” he continued. “There’re still five or six tots in the village, in their grandparents’ care. The others are all gone. Our elementary school closed down two years ago ’cause there weren’t enough pupils. Parents pull their kids out of school earlier nowadays, even before they finish middle school.”