by Anchee Min
I sat by the living mummy while my father and his cousins went in the kitchen. I watched Great-Aunt suck each candy and throw it back in the box. What did living mean to this creature? I envied Great-Aunt’s brainlessness. She had no worries, no despair. A life without pain. Such a way of leaving the world seemed to be the kindest thing God in heaven could grant a person.
* * *
Leaves began to drop from the tree of my spirit. I could only lie in torment. I could only let the dead leaves brush my stone-cold face. In the far reaches of my mind the leaves sang sad songs as they were swept away by the bitter wind.
It was two days before Katherine’s departure. In the afternoon I received a letter from her. When the mailman handed me the letter, my hands trembled.
Inside was a card made of straw paper with a poem written in black ink.
You came unprotected like a bud in winter
On a willow tree, eager to take on nature’s plan.
Did you realize the struggle?
Were you aware of the forces that
Tried to keep you down?
Despite all inclement fury
A beautiful sculpturesque
Branch you became, welcoming
The breeze and accepting
The frost.
My Goddess in armor
I love you.
In her P.S. she asked me to meet her on her last afternoon in China. She said that besides saying goodbye she needed a favor from me and would let me know what it was when we met.
* * *
The address she had given me was a brick façade located next to a smelly food market on the south side of the city. Behind the façade, ramshackle apartment houses rose on either side. The alley was dark. The air smelled like hen shit. I heard babies crying. The sound of someone scrubbing a chamberpot. As I made my way through the passageway, I bumped my head on an aluminum pot that hung overhead. Wet towels brushed my face. I almost stumbled over a smoking stove. The long, deep cough of an old lady came from the opposite window. After the cough came the old lady’s cursing: “You are tightening the strap on a hanging ghost! No need to, you hear me?” Kids’ screaming came from streets. A mother was spanking her child. She called him a preserved cucumber and threatened to break him in two. A flying broom crossed my path. The child ran by and shot down a narrow staircase.
I came to the courtyard and ran into the mother who was chasing her boy.
“Who are you?” she asked me, irritated.
“I am looking for room number nine.”
The woman pointed her finger up high and said that it was the attic. She hurried off after the boy.
Before I could knock, the attic door opened a crack, and Katherine’s face appeared. She quickly let me in and closed the door behind me.
“Jim lent me this room,” Katherine explained. “It was his uncle’s room. His uncle died about a month ago and the government hasn’t reclaimed the room yet.”
There was no light in the room. Daylight came in through broken shutters. There was no furniture. Katherine sat down on the floor. She gestured for me to sit beside her.
“How are you?” she asked.
I nodded. It felt difficult to speak.
“I need your help.” She looked anxious.
I nodded again.
“Please help raise Little Rabbit when I’m gone. Here is all the money I have. One thousand U.S. dollars. I’d like you to take over the adoption, use the money to buy off the authorities if necessary. I’ll send you more money through Jim. He’ll let us use his mailbox. He will change the dollars to Chinese money for you. Will you help me?”
I saw tears glittering in her eyes. I wanted to tell her that I would do anything for her. I took her money and placed it carefully in my inner pocket.
She took my hands and put her head in my palms. Her tears wet my sleeves. I bent to embrace her. Lifting her chin, I looked at this face. I remembered the first day I saw her in class.
She smiled. I asked what time her flight was.
“Early tomorrow morning,” she replied. Her voice carried no energy. “I can’t believe I’m not allowed to enter China again. You were right, I was too naive about this country.”
We went silent. The sunshine slowly moved toward the west. Noises came from the food market below. The afternoon shopping time had begun. People were screaming and yelling to get ahead of each other in line. A vendor swore, calling her customer “Pig Brains.” I could hear the sound of tin scales.
What images would Katherine take back with her from China?
“You must tell me about Elephant Fields,” said Katherine. “I know it’s going to be extremely difficult for you. I’m ashamed that I couldn’t help. But I am going to try. In any case, we must, must keep in touch.”
I nodded and then asked what time we had to leave this place and whether she would have time to have dinner with me. She said we had to be out in fifteen minutes. She had to go to the library to return all her books before it closed. I realized that this was my last time to be with her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You are welcome,” I said, my words stuck.
We didn’t know what else to say to each other.
“Thanks for everything you shared with me, I mean everything . . .” She lost her words. She tried to smile. Failed. She sighed and turned away. I looked at her remarkable lynx eyes. She entered my memory moment by moment.
Despair overwhelmed me. I didn’t know what would happen to me at Elephant Fields, didn’t know who from my wretched past I would find there. I did not know whether I would even be permitted to contact Katherine. I couldn’t warn her about it. I could not shut down her hope. Little Rabbit was her baby. I had to keep her hope alive.
Katherine was no longer an American guest. She had lived a Chinese life, not a long one but an intense one. She had learned everything she was supposed to learn about China but one thing: she still did not understand that my spiritual life ended here, right at this moment. I could feel Satan knocking on my heart’s door, hurrying me to hell.
* * *
“Dance with me,” Katherine said as she took a tiny cassette player from her bag. “We’ll keep the volume low.”
Without waiting for my response, she took me by the hand. She held me tight.
The music was so soft we could hear the floor squeak under our feet. Our shadows moved on the wall. I leaned my head on her shoulder. She pulled me in, slowly. Her breath hit my cheek. I wanted to tell her that I had been in love with her since the first day I met her. I wanted to tell her that I couldn’t imagine life without her.
As if she knew what I was going to say, she wouldn’t give me the chance to talk. She held me, her eyes closed. Her hair smelled like fresh flowers. Her fingers came to soothe my face. I closed my eyes and felt the rhythm of her body.
“I am taking you with me,” she murmured. “I am taking you.”
I opened my eyes.
I saw tears running down her face.
I held her, trying to feel her, her love, her shape, her voice. My America, farewell.
As a borrowed worker, I was “honorably returned” to Elephant Fields. Mr. Han did not speak with me, not even a word, after graduation. The notice of my departure was posted on the door of my parents’ home. It was marked with a deadline date and had an official red Party stamp. I was a skeleton nailed in a coffin. Mr. Han blew me away like dust. My family could do nothing but weep for me.
Mother spent all her savings buying fresh meat and vegetables to feed me as if every meal was my last on earth. She cooked spicy meat and bean paste and put it in jars for me to take along. My father stir-fried bags of flour I could eat with hot water as a kind of porridge. My parents did everything silently, preparing me and themselves for my departure.
My schoolmates and neighbors had nothing to say about my assignment. Indifference was the Chinese way. “Clean up the snow in your own yard, pay no attention to the frost on other people’s roofs.”
As a last-ditch effort, I wrote Mr. Han and the district Party committee letters demanding to be treated fairly. The letters were like stones thrown in water—I received no response. I felt like a mantis trying to stop a carriage with its legs. I was vanishing, vanishing into the ocean of a billion people. I became faceless and voiceless.
* * *
Bus, train, train, and bus, days and nights, passing mountains and rivers through central China—my journey was a ride to hell. When a tractor finally dropped me off at Elephant Fields, I lost my strength completely. For a while I was not able to get on my feet and walk. My whole being was paralyzed, a chill froze my blood. My pupils enlarged, my vision blurred, my limbs were numb. I lay on my stomach, my breath thinner than thread.
Elephant Fields looked the same, the “ear” standing out like a giant chip against the sky. The vast gray land made me feel small as an ant. I had no tears. Having escaped hell only to be returned made me learn the depth of pain. Slowly I forced myself to stand up and walk.
By evening I was registering at the Party secretary’s office, a wooden house that carried the sound of the wind’s whistle. The Party boss told me that he had just been appointed to the job. He was a sixty-five-year-old man named Lao Guener—Old Woodstick. His Mao jacket was patched with different-colored cloth. He said he had received my dossier from the Shanghai Party office and he knew who I was. If I didn’t have anything more to explain, he would just assign me to a tent with two other female workers. I asked if there were bad things written about me in the dossier so I would know what I had to explain. He said he couldn’t possibly tell me, it was against Party law.
“The past is not that important, Chairman Mao once taught us,” Lao Guener said, his breath smelling strongly of tobacco. “What’s important is how you behave from now on. Everybody’s got a pair of eyes. I believe what I see. So my point is don’t worry about what’s in your dossier.”
As he showed me to my tent, I asked him about some of my ex-workmates. Lao Guener told me that with the Central Bureau’s policy change of 1980, all city youths were allowed to leave. Overnight, thousands of people packed up and left. The only ones who stayed were local peasants, the city youths who had married locals and had children (their children were not allowed to go to the cities), and ex-criminals who were too ashamed to go home. Elephant Fields had also been used as a rehabilitation camp.
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Lao Guener said proudly. “Look at this city of tents. It reminds me of my days as a Red Army soldier. This way the revisionists will never be able to corrupt our proletarian spirit.”
As I unpacked, the smell of dynamite once again overwhelmed me. My tentmates were local peasants. They were illiterate and spoke a dialect I couldn’t understand. We looked at each other like birds. They showed me the nearest path to the pond for water.
I shut down all my senses and worked like a machine. We slept in rows of tents and went to work wherever the job took us. The workers sang, “The sky is my blanket and the rocky ground my bed.” I went to work dressed in stars and came back to the tent carrying the moon on my head. After the first week my muscles began to ache. My chest hurt when I coughed or took a shit. The fifty-pound hammer once again became my only companion.
I tried to find traces of the life I had lived here before. The riverbank where I had my miscarriage had dried up. The bushes nearby were gone. Only the sky was the same, gray as a dead person’s skin.
We melted ice cubes to cook food. There was no place to shower. My skin flaked like an animal’s in the desert. When my body itched, I would rub my back against a wall like a bear.
* * *
I made fifty yuan a month and sent twenty-five to a village nanny who had been taking care of Little Rabbit for me. The nanny lived twenty miles away from me.
I’d played tricks to get Little Rabbit out of the orphanage. I figured that after Katherine was gone, Mr. Han couldn’t care less about what happened to Little Rabbit. So I faked papers that convinced the headmistress of the orphanage that the case against Katherine had been mishandled and I stuffed her pockets with money.
She said, “No! I cannot take any money from you.”
“What about donations?” I asked.
She nodded hesitantly.
“Then consider these two hundred yuan a donation.”
Little Rabbit was released to me. I asked the headmistress what had happened to the certificate of adoption that had been prepared for Katherine. She said she didn’t know what to do with the document, but wasn’t sure she should give it to me. I said I just wanted to keep it, I would not show it to anybody.
“You have a very nice watch,” she said.
I took off my watch. “It’s yours.” Again she didn’t want to take it, and again I called it a donation. She took the watch and gave me the certificate.
* * *
My life was once again empty. During the day I worked with dynamite. At night I played the tapes Katherine left me on her Walkman. Her poem lay under my pillow. Although I tried to live up to her image of a “goddess in armor,” I couldn’t delude myself that life could change if only my will stayed strong. I imagined Katherine’s life in America. I imagined her in a car and wondered how it felt to ride in a car.
I was attacked by nightmares—the most frightening was one in which Katherine had forgotten us. I woke up thinking, She was a foreigner, after all. She’s getting on with her life. Maybe she’d adopted children from other countries or got married and was thinking about having children of her own.
* * *
Three months had passed, and it felt like thirty years. In the absence of hope, insanity set in. One day I was boiling water on a gasoline stove outside my tent. The wind suddenly changed direction and the tent caught fire. My tentmates told me I stood still, watching the fire chew up the tent. I was shocked at myself afterward. If my tentmates hadn’t been there, I would have let the fire keep burning. I knew I would have. I wouldn’t have done a thing.
* * *
Little Rabbit was my only link to sanity. She had grown taller and had two pigtails. The village nanny and her family were kind to her. The nanny had been trying to correct bad habits she had developed at the orphanage, like peeing or shitting wherever she happened to be. It amazed me to hear her talk like a normal person with a voice. She was Katherine’s miracle. She told me that she wanted to look like Katherine when she grew up.
“I am going to eat a lot so I can have a pe-gue as big as my mama’s, even bigger,” she said seriously, her hands making the shape of buttocks in the air. She had a good imagination too. She would describe to me how a fly was trying to steal the crackers she was eating.
One afternoon as I sat chatting with the nanny, it began to rain outside. Little Rabbit climbed up on a chair and watched rain drip off the window frame. She was quiet for a long time, then all of a sudden, she stretched out her arms toward the sky and said, “Stop crying! Why are you crying? Nao-mee-bee.” Shame on you. Then she jumped off the chair and came to sit on my lap. She asked me why the sky was crying. I didn’t answer her. I was thinking about Katherine.
After her nap, Little Rabbit was still thinking about the crying sky. She said to me, “When I was sleeping, the rain came to cry in my body. I said, ‘No! It’s bad to cry.’ The rain got mad and made me pee in my bed. Nao-mee-bee.”
Katherine was missing so much.
* * *
The mailman became the object of my secret obsession. He came once a week on a tractor. When he called out the names on the packages and envelopes he delivered was a time of hope and disappointment. I accumulated countless disappointments, but every week I still had a little hope.
The first day of the fourth month since my arrival, Katherine’s first letter arrived. It came through Jim. He sealed her letter in a Chinese envelope and sent it on to me. My heart zigzagged in my chest when I opened the envelope. “It’s her writing, her touch,” I heard myself murmur. I ran until I exhausted myself. In tears, I lay on my back in
the field. I kissed the letter over and over. Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, I called.
She wrote that she had corresponded with Jim the minute she landed in America to make sure that it would work. At first the letters came back marked “return to sender,” but recently the letters got through. She guessed it was because there was more and more business communication between the two countries; it was impossible for the Chinese government to spy on every private letter. She said she was working as an associate professor in the history department of a California college and she was well. She’d told her family and friends about me and Little Rabbit and she believed that we would meet again. She asked how I was doing and said she was missing me and Little Rabbit to pieces.
I tried to write back, but it was a hard letter to compose. What should I write about? My life as a prisoner? The development of my joint problems? How my blisters bled every night? The pain of my dry, peeling skin? How the food tasted like sand and how I peed and shit like a mountain goat on rocks?
I decided to write about Little Rabbit, telling her about the child’s dreams and way of talking. I could hear Katherine laughing. How I missed her laugh! I avoided talking about myself because I didn’t want to upset her. Katherine would have a good idea of what kind of life I led at Elephant Fields anyway.
I copied the letter onto a clean sheet and placed it beneath my pillow. I wrote Jim’s address on the envelope. The next morning before work I went to the local post office. The postal clerk asked me if the letter carried any urgent message because the mail was only collected from this box once a month. The next closest box was six miles away, but the mail was picked up once a week. I ran to the other post office and mailed the letter off.
In her return letter Katherine wrote that she had been screaming for joy for three days. Hearing from me made her feel like she had woken up from a coma. She told me she had been closely studying China’s changing role in the world. She wrote that there were over fifty thousand Chinese students in the United States and she was investigating how they had made it over.