by Anchee Min
The smell of wildflowers pierced my nostrils. The leaves trembled in the wind. I felt the humming of the earth. Slowly fog came from everywhere, gathering around our faces and covering our bodies like a blanket.
The color of the night began to sink into our skin. The moon cast its glow on a cloud. “Will there be wolves out tonight?” I asked, although I knew that wolves had disappeared from these parts a hundred years ago.
“Are you afraid?” Lion Head asked. His voice was filled with excitement. “I love darkness.” He turned to look at me. His lion hair stood on its roots.
* * *
Lion Head asked me if I thought he was an attractive man. I told him that actually I used to think he was unattractive. He asked why. I reluctantly recalled that his shortness, his rawness, his arrogance had bothered me. He laughed. “What was it that made you change your mind?”
I admitted that Katherine’s point of view had changed me. She made me question my aesthetics and turned the beast into a beauty. Katherine taught me to respect nature as a whole, to appreciate individuality, to value uniqueness. It was in seeing him through Katherine’s eyes that he became attractive to me, and it was because of my belief in Katherine that I began to be aware of beauty I had never thought existed. Lion Head nodded appreciatively and said that I was lucky.
I asked Lion Head about the way he grew up and about his family. He said that he was the eldest of seven children. His father was a dockworker and his mother a washwoman. She charged two cents per garment. From the time he was five years old, he collected and delivered clothes around town. Hunger was the prominent memory of his childhood. He said he did anything for food. He fed his brothers and sisters with the food he stole. He learned how to con people and once in a while he’d get caught and play innocent. He always got away. He became a self-educated opportunist at a very young age.
He was small for his age and had to fight his way through school. But his three-generation-true-proletarian background made him look politically reliable. He joined the Communist Party at sixteen and was honored as a good comrade every year.
He knew he was not what he seemed. While in school he stole books. Western books which made him realize what he truly desired. He managed to gain the trust of his Party bosses and peers. He made everyone believe he was sincere, that he would die for the Party. He made himself a humble man in the Party’s eyes and he won privilege.
When he swore his allegiance at the Party’s enrollment ceremony, he did not feel guilty about his lies. He firmly believed that to lie was the only way to live a truthful life.
Lion Head said he was honest with me because we were of the same kind. “You are a woman with a split personality,” he said. “You are a masked lady during the day, just like I am a masked good guy. But we become our true selves at night. In the dark we can do things our way. When Chairman Mao closes his eyes, we come out to catch field rats like owls. We are too smart to starve, and too curious to waste our lives. The only way to be ourselves is to answer each other’s call. Like radio waves in the air, we connect ourselves to the right channels.”
I felt a chill and could not reply.
“Here we are, and this is our fate. I don’t think you would sell me out, because we’re on the same chopping block. We need each other, we are each other’s spiritual food. Selling me out means selling out yourself. I know that you think this is cold and dispassionate, but let me tell you, I am passionate enough to come here with you, and you know the risk involved. Comfort me now and I will comfort you. Let’s strip the great proletarian mask. Let’s be naked, be bad, be animals. We’ll be our hidden selves.”
* * *
Lion Head took off his clothes. He lay down next to me. Tenderly he touched me. The warmth of his body stirred my insides. He began whispering. He said that he wondered if I understood the phrase “the spine of the wind,” because that was what Lion Head was all about. He was the wind, he walked at the wind’s will. His free-spirited soul was everywhere and nowhere. He came without a sound, went without a shadow.
* * *
Lion Head asked me to tell him where I came from. He wanted me to tell the story straight and flat, and I did. My family was from the southern part of the country. My grandfather worked as a bank clerk. He was a little man with a pair of thick glasses. He was scared all the time. He lost his job when his company went bankrupt. The family fled from the Shantung Province to Shanghai.
On their way to Shanghai my mother, a thirteen-year-old girl, had a nervous breakdown on the ship. There was an outbreak of typhoid fever on board. My mother’s elder brother and younger sister were infected. There was no money, no doctor. The children were dying. The passengers were superstitious—they said that if anyone died on the ship, it would sink. Her dying brother and sister were thrown into the sea before they exhaled their last breath. My mother witnessed the scene in shock. No goodbyes, no tears. She broke down silently. Her family was no longer the same. A year later, in Shanghai, my grandmother died of throat cancer. My grandfather suffered sudden heart failure and died shortly after.
My mother married my father when she was a college student studying to become an elementary-school teacher. She believed that education was the only way to save China. My father was a grocery-shop clerk. I delivered goods for him from the time I was five.
Then came the Anti-rightist Movement. The Party security force arrested my father at midnight. I was sound asleep, dreaming about riding a train. There was noise. A group of people were knocking at our door violently. They broke in and took my father away. They said he was a capitalist promoter. The date was April 3, 1959; he and my mother had just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary.
My father was charged as a traitor because he had worked as a policeman-in-training for the railroad before the 1949 Communist Liberation, when he was a middle-school student, a teenager. He was charged as a result of his confession. He could have hidden his past from the Party. He didn’t have to tell the truth. He could have denied everything like so many of his colleagues. But he was an honest man.
My father thought serving as a policeman was not wrong. His intention was to protect passengers on trains who were working-class people.
Being honest killed my father. He was sentenced to twenty years in jail because one more body was needed to fill a quota established as a response to Chairman Mao’s anti-rightist call. For twenty years my father left his wife and young children behind. I began to hate trains because they took my father away.
I was never the same after my father left. My mother’s fairy tales lost their effect. The lesson I learned from my father was chiseled into my little brain. I learned that to be honest was to be stupid. I couldn’t forget the moment my father was taken away. I could never trust again. My father was allowed to visit his family only once, when I was eight. Our life was ruined because of his sin.
My father was pronounced innocent in 1979. Two days before New Year’s Eve he was released, with a piece of paper issued by the government saying he was a “good comrade.” We went to pick him up at the train station. I didn’t recognize him. I saw my mother take a blue cotton bag from an old man. The man walked with trembling legs. Mother told us to call him Dad. We did it awkwardly. My father’s hair and beard were white. He said that he couldn’t see very well. He almost got hit by a bus when we crossed the street. He sighed and sighed and rubbed his eyes all the time. He had strange habits. He had to sleep with the light on.
My mother had become an eccentric old lady. From the start she had a hard time with my father. She’d grown used to living all by herself. There were other men who had been nice to her. But for us, she waited for our father. She had dreamt about the family’s reunion for the last twenty years. Now she had it. But my father was no longer the man she had known. Her expectations crashed.
My father turned into a lunatic. My mother would talk about her lost youth. She spoke about her bad luck for ever having married such a man. My mother made me sick to my bones with her c
omplaining, but I could see her point. I couldn’t stand my father either. His mind was still imprisoned. He was frightened all the time. He kept the windows shut all summer. He was afraid of the sunshine. He would rather sit and steam than come outside and enjoy the cool air. He would shout in his dreams, “Yes sir, death to reactionaries! Long live Chairman Mao!” Once he woke up the whole neighborhood. My mother said that he had been sent back from hell because he woke up the dead and the god of hell thought he was too much trouble.
I grew up on the street. I thought I deserved it because I had a father in jail. He was an enemy of the proletariat. I publicly denounced my father at ten. I took my mother’s last name. I had the wildest imagination about the life I should have lived, a life free of guilt. I would make believe I was a revolutionary martyr’s orphan. I would pretend I’d been injured in a car accident while saving the lives of three children and was brought to meet Chairman Mao. This is what I dreamt of throughout elementary school.
* * *
Lion Head was holding me, listening to me in the dark.
I didn’t tell him much about Elephant Fields. I only told him that the village chief invited me to his family dinner the day I arrived. The family cooked a big bowl of rice for the occasion. I was waiting for the black lid to be lifted off when I realized it was a layer of flies. They formed a thick, dark fly-lid. I threw up.
Peasant families ate with the flies without a blink of the eye. I lived with one family for eight years, until I could eat with the flies without a blink of the eye, until my hair turned gray. I was twenty-six when I left.
Lion Head felt me shiver. He said I didn’t have to go on. He said he understood that I lost all I had at Elephant Fields—youth, dreams, and most of all, faith. He said what I told was not just my story, it was the story of many of our generation.
* * *
I looked at Lion Head as he leaned over to kiss me. He whispered that we’d had enough misery and now we must enjoy life. Softly his hand began to touch my body. I became tense. My body was longing for intimacy, but my brain was not in sync. I could feel my mind split in two: I wanted to throw myself into Lion Head’s embrace, but I resisted this journey of passion. I wanted to be loved, but I knew all I had with Lion Head was physical attraction.
He whispered that he was burning for me. His touches were oil on a fire. He murmured that he wanted me, and I heard my body moan in pleasure. My mind began to surrender. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto my face. I let myself be led.
The midnight wind began to whistle. The dog-tail grass brushed my face. I cried because it had been so long since I had allowed someone to touch me. Lion Head’s gentleness made me believe I was loved. As he aroused my body, he aroused my memory.
Images presented themselves in full force without my mind’s consent. Gray sky and dynamite, blood spreading down my legs, dyeing my shoes, wiping my bloody hand on the dry reeds, my running feet, the moving land, my voiceless scream, the horizon tilts . . .
Lion Head felt me shudder. He stopped. He hugged me tightly as if he knew. His fingers smoothed my cheek. I thought of Katherine, wished I were her so I wouldn’t be so uneasy. The thought surprised me and made me think how much I had been wanting to be Katherine and not myself. I could hear Katherine’s laughter, hear her sweet voice speaking Chinese.
Lion Head resumed his caresses. Until now I hadn’t understood how much had been taken away from me. I put my arms around Lion Head. I felt like a child.
“You are a bird who’s lost her wings,” he said softly. “I want to give you new wings. I want to see you fly again. I want you to need me, to depend on me, to share the madness of desire with me. I’ll throw the flashlight into the waterfall so we won’t be able to go home, so we’ll be scared. We will protect each other. We’ll fight our fear together.”
He rolled on top of me, touching me with his breath, massaging me with his words. “Don’t worry. I will not enter you. Feel the wind’s hand,” he whispered in my ear. “Listen. I can hear the far sea moan. Listen carefully.” My imagination rippled like the sea. “I can hear the wind sing in the trees.” His hair swept my face and I heard him say, “Show me your wild summer, show me now.”
He moved his body over me, then pulled away, away from my lips, my chest. “No,” he said, clenching his teeth. “Don’t break the rules. You’ll be eaten by darkness, disfigured.” Electric charges ran through my body. Our lust was like the chill of the grave. I wanted to beg him, beg him to touch me. I wanted to say, Please, please hold me. But I couldn’t say it. I was ashamed of my desire. “Tell me you don’t want this,” he commanded. “Tell me you can live by yourself and be alone forever.” I felt my body opening for him.
“Tell me you need me, say it, let me hear it, say it to me,” he groaned. His head was wet, his mouth sweet.
“I want you,” I heard myself say.
He grabbed me and shook me. “You poisoned snake, you thick cloud, you pouring rain, you hungry tiger, bite me, take my life, give me yours, I’ll give myself to you.”
He guided my hands to explore his body. He took pleasure in resisting pleasure. He enjoyed the torture, the cruelty. He watched me turn into a wild animal.
Our bodies began to wrestle. He wouldn’t let himself have me. When his breath came heavier, he pulled himself back and rolled off my body, leaving my head against his knees. “Say you want me,” he ordered, touching himself with my hand.
“I want you,” I repeated after him breathlessly.
Like the sea roaring at a night of thunder, Lion Head lay on his back and wailed, “Oh, my wild horse! My poisonous scorpion! My sweet lilac, my fat lotus . . .” His other hand pulled at the grass, his feet digging pits in the earth, as he arched his body, exposing himself to the mid-moon.
My body trembled in violent pleasure.
“Wait for me,” he murmured. “I will come again.”
* * *
“I could tell you guys had something going on.” Katherine’s frankness embarrassed me, though I was eager to have someone to confide in. Katherine insisted on knowing what we did, how I felt, and whether I was in love. I didn’t know what to say.
She asked if Lion Head was a good lover. I said that I had no way to compare. Katherine demanded the details. She wanted to learn the Chinese way, she said.
I was secretly pleased to have her attention.
“Lion Head wanted to please me and he wanted to know if I was pleased,” I began my reporting.
“Were you?” Katherine asked. Her eyes were bright.
I told Katherine that I was not clear about my feelings. I didn’t feel pleased or unpleased. I recognized my lust and it embarrassed me. I remembered the desire and I was not sure about the rest.
“It’s all right not to be so clear,” Katherine comforted me. “Your Zen masters say that one’s true state is ‘unclassified.’ It’s not meant to be learned. You know, like how the hand can’t grasp itself. Then again there’s the old American saying, ‘Relationships are like buying a pair of shoes; you’ve got to try them on to see if they fit.’”
I did not like her American saying. Her dirty frankness bothered me. “I am no shoes to be tried on.”
“Forgive me,” she said. “You have to remember that I’m just trying to be your friend.”
I told her that in China we called prostitutes “worn-out shoes.”
* * *
The leaves outside my window looked like paper cutouts. I couldn’t sleep. The world around me seemed so senseless, yet I could not stop myself from trying to make sense out of it. Maybe that’s what Lion Head and I were to each other, an escape from the senseless world.
The way he talked about escape, though, was full of contradictions. He talked about letting the mind go and moving with the flow of change, like a ball in a mountain stream, how transcendence would be a kind of ecstasy, but then he would say: “I really want to go away. Far away and never come back. I want to go to a place where no one can abuse my will, where I’d be free to do what
ever I pleased.” He said he was just waiting for the chance. “Pray for me when you go to the temples,” he said.
I tried to catch his thoughts but it was like trying to catch water with a sieve. When I asked him how he defined love, he sang me an ancient song.
Chin-chin-tse-chin
Youg-youg-wou-shin
The color of your scarf
The spring of my heart
Chin-chin-tse-pei
Youg-youg-wou-si
The lace of your jade
The thread of my craving
“Love is a song,” Lion Head continued. “It’s all in the presentation. I worship love for its magic and power. Do I know what it is? You’re asking the wrong person. We grew up with hatred—how are we supposed to know love?”
* * *
That night I thought again of my father’s life in jail. Of his solitary cell, no larger than a coffin, a small opening the only source of light and air. How it was impossible to stand up, how he lay on the bare concrete without a cot, how he was defenseless against the winter, how his joints were slowly destroyed. Twenty years of longing, every waking minute wondering how his wife and children were. Twenty years of severe loneliness. The Party believed “loneliness was the scalpel one used to perform surgery on the soul.” My father relied on his imagination to survive.
Unlike Lion Head, I felt I knew love because I had experienced enough hatred. I knew what it was like to miss a dear person like my father as a child. I knew what it was like to sit on the corner, dreaming of greeting my father as he gets off the bus. I learned that the cruelty of winter teaches one to appreciate the warmth of spring—unbearable summer, the coolness of autumn.
* * *
I visited Katherine early one evening to look over her Chinese composition. It was an excuse to see her. She never mentioned paying me money again; perhaps she understood she could pay me back with her attention.
I found Katherine interesting no matter what she said or did. I collected in my mind the comments she dropped. She said amazing things that I had never thought of, like, “Give voice to your deepest and most immediate emotion.” She would explain and explain until I understood what she meant. In this case she said she had been talking about the kind of emotion that existed in poems and that responded only to the thoughts and sensations that gave birth to poems.