A Single Swallow

by Ling Zhang

  “Drink,” she said softly, “it’s still warm.”

  It was milk. Her expression was as flat as a piece of paper, neither happy nor dejected. It was as if she’d handed me nothing more than an ordinary cup of boiled water.

  When she turned around, I saw a corner of the back of her shirt stuck in her waistband. In an instant, my brain generated a strange line of thought. I saw the pig livers, the bits of meat mixed in with the mudfish, and the oil blossoms floating in the carp soup all suddenly turning into waistbands. When was the first time Ah Yan’s waistband had been loosened? When she asked for a red stamp on my identification paper? Or when the veins on her arms had become so hard, she couldn’t poke through them? Or when I spat out the fried pork liver? The first time, it might have been difficult, but easier the second time. By the third time, it was habit. Perhaps now she didn’t even need a waistband anymore.

  The cup of milk placed before me was white and pure, with a layer of fat so smooth a fly could slip on it. It suddenly brought back all the memories from the last time I had seen milk. It stretched out thousands of hooks and caught my nose, and my nose extended the hooks into my stomach with the same force. My brain split in two. One half screamed, Dump out the whole cup! But it was no use. My hand didn’t listen, nor did my stomach. Even the other half of my brain didn’t hear. Desire shamelessly beat its drums in my temple, and my hand reached out tremblingly toward the cup. I watched as it raised the cup and poured the contents into my mouth, all of Ah Yan’s blood and lies and her waistband too. I drank every last drop of it. My stomach buzzed with satisfaction. The air around me seemed embarrassed and turned from me in shame. Even the bedding was covered with goose bumps.

  There are so many ways people can become animals. The quickest route was to lose our sense of shame. I knew that what finally crushed my will was not the pestilence that hollowed my body out, but my shame. From that day on, I stopped eating. I built a Great Wall of my teeth, stubbornly resisting any food that Ah Yan shoved toward me with a spoon. I quickly approached death. Seeing that I was determined to go, she sent a telegram to Ah May, who still didn’t know about my situation, telling her to come home.

  When Ah May saw my skeletal form, she burst into tears. With the same hands she’d used to hang from my arm when she was four, causing me a wound from which I never recovered, she hugged my neck tightly.

  “Daddy, Daddy. How can you be so heartless?” she said.

  She was like a broken record player, repeating the same song over and over.

  I wanted to say, Ah May, I wish you could go back into your mother’s belly and be born all over again, so I could spend your whole childhood with you this time. But I had no strength, so these words remained somewhere between my heart and my lips, never seeing the light of day.

  There was another thing stuck in the same space, this one for Ah Yan: I wanted to give you a child, but I couldn’t.

  Learning to fight at the training camp, I had been injured so badly, I became permanently infertile. I’d known from the beginning, but didn’t tell Ah Yan. This regret was too heavy, and I was afraid Ah Yan couldn’t bear it.

  I took my last breath in the arms of Ah Yan and Ah May. It had been eighteen years since Pastor Billy died on the Jefferson. Five years later, Scabby was killed during a stupid fight, and his crazed wife disappeared. Twenty-four years later, Ah May followed Yang Jianguo to the States for his studies. And fifty-two years later, Ian died in the veterans hospital on the outskirts of Detroit.

  In the end, that was how I abandoned Ah Yan.

  It wasn’t just me who abandoned her, but you too, Pastor Billy and Ian Ferguson. We entered her life at different stages and all led her to the summit of hope, then left her in our own unique ways, letting her fall into the valley of despair to face life’s storms and clean up the aftermath on her own. After I became a ghost, I was secretly glad I didn’t have to live through the greater humiliation Ah Yan suffered during the Cultural Revolution. My selfishness goes on and on.

  From the time of her birth to my death, we knew each other for thirty-four years. She signed her life away on a piece of paper without hesitation to help me escape conscription. I delayed my journey to Yan’an for her, changing the course of my entire life. I jumped off the boat of an uncertain future for her and was ultimately imprisoned. She sacrificed to hide me and rescue me from prison, risking her own life over and over. I poured my whole heart out for her and Ah May, and she poured her heart out for me. No, she poured out more than her heart. She also poured out her blood, her reputation, and her chastity for me. Perhaps all there was between us was sympathy, compassion, pity, loyalty, and mutual aid in difficult times. I don’t know if the sum of all those things is love, but I know love is eclipsed in their presence.

  Looking back now, I see that Ah Yan and I never talked about the war that completely rewrote our lives. It was taboo to both of us. We were separated by that taboo and so forever missed out on sharing our full hearts.

  Ian Ferguson: The Tale of a Button

  In the first few years after I went home, memories of the war were so fresh, it was almost like I was still there, but they were eventually buried beneath the monotony of everyday life, only awakened at reunions with my old comrades (and I didn’t always attend the reunions), after which they’d go back to sleep until the next one. It was only in old age when the dust of life settled that those memories fully returned, retaking the space those trivial things had pushed them out of, like grass returning to a vacant lot or a spider returning to a neglected corner to spin its web again.

  The memory of war isn’t the same as the war itself. Memory overlays a mosaic on a bloody scene and alters the original colors and textures of an event. For instance, when I thought of Snot, I forgot how his head had been tanned from exposure to the sun and only recall the rising and falling cadence of his sniffing in the classroom. Memory not only modifies the image but also distorts the sounds, giving them a layer of glaze more palatable to the ear and eye, causing them to produce a false phonology and poetry.

  In 1988, I took my wife to China, but I didn’t visit our old stomping grounds, because Yuehu wasn’t open to the outside world then. I made it to Hangzhou, capital of the jurisdictional region that included Yuehu, but that was the closest I could get to Yuehu. I found a little river and a group of ducks on the outskirts of Hangzhou, and we sat by the water, my nose twitching like that of a dog scenting a rabbit. I wanted to see if the river smelled like the lake at Yuehu. The water was clean, and so were the ducks. They floated on a surface as smooth as a mirror, and the reflection made each duck look like conjoined twins.

  “No, Yuehu’s ducks aren’t like that,” I said aloud.

  I told my wife about Yuehu. I told her how a farmer herded a group of ducks with a bamboo pole into a field where the crops had just been harvested. The ducks didn’t move as individuals, but in a neat row guided by the pole, like a disciplined squad of feathery soldiers. The farmer drove the ducks to the field, then left them there searching for whatever rice remained on the ground. When it was about to get dark, the farmer drove the full-bellied ducks back to the river with his pole, while his wife and children picked up the eggs the ducks had laid, eggs as round and white as pebbles washed by the rain.

  It wasn’t the first time I spoke of Yuehu to Emily. She looked at me, smiled, and said warmly, “Yes, of course, Ian,” like she was indulging a whimsical, mischievous child.

  Emily. That’s right. Emily Wilson, later Emily Robinson, had as her final name, the name on her death certificate, Emily Ferguson. The woman I was planning to propose to when I went off to war. While I was serving in China, she went and married that Robinson fellow. God was merciful, though, because she not only crushed my heart but also played a part in shaping the fate of a Chinese woman named Wende.

  Under the points system, I made my way through the long line to return to America between the spring and summer of 1946. That Christmas, I ran into Emily in a café in Chicago. Her husband
had died five months earlier in a car accident. Fate is full of mockery. She’d left me in an attempt to escape life’s impermanence, marrying a man she might not have really loved. She couldn’t have known that she’d run headlong into the very thing she’d been trying to escape. On the other hand, I, who she’d thought was much closer to death, returned safely from the war and lived well beyond the natural span of life to become an obnoxious old man, from both a physical and a spiritual perspective. We quickly rekindled our romance. War had been a reasonable cause for all betrayal and separation. It created and also healed all emotional wounds.

  The next Easter, Emily and I got married. The life that had been cut off by the war gradually fell back onto its original track. I completed the mechanics course I’d dropped out of, passed the licensing test, and after a few years working as a mechanic in Chicago, we moved to Detroit, and I opened my first auto shop, just like I’d always dreamed. In the decades that followed, I expanded it into a chain of auto shops. Emily worked as a secretary and bookkeeper in my company, but later decided to stay home full time, after we had three kids.

  Compared to Liu Zhaohu’s turbulent life, mine was calm for decades after the war. The days were monotonous and repetitive. I did the same thing every day. I went to work, and I came home, working hard so I could pay the mortgage on a house in the suburbs, tuition for private school, and of course piano and ballet lessons. I called the teachers to find out how the kids were doing at school and made pediatrician and dentist appointments. I took the family to the park for a picnic on weekends (weather permitting), and we drove back to Chicago for Thanksgiving and Christmas to visit my parents, just like our kids came to visit us when we were old. It seems those days were all spat out like pages from a copier, each copy just like the original. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

  The first bolt of lightning in my tranquil life came in 1992. I was seventy-one, recently retired, and adapting to the new rhythm of doing nothing. The storm seemed to come abruptly, but it had been brewing for a long time. It was the product of the war. Like a hurricane hidden in the darkness, gathering in the distance, waiting for the right conditions, it finally swept across the ocean. When the first wave landed at my door, it had more than forty years of momentum behind it. The tempest threw open the doors to my emotional world and revealed the demons deep inside, demons I didn’t even know were there. The waves of that storm continued to crash in until the last moments of my life.

  It was a winter morning, and it was cold, but the sun was bright, and the pigeons cooing in the distance were peaceful. I’d just had breakfast and was drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. My eyelid suddenly started twitching violently, as if an invisible rope was being pulled by an invisible hand. I suddenly recalled Buffalo, who’d served me so faithfully in Yuehu, and what he’d told me. When the left eye twitches, it’s good luck, and when the right eye twitches, it’s bad. Or maybe it was When the right eye twitches, it’s good luck, and when the left eye twitches, it’s bad. Anyway, it was my left eye that twitched, so the odds were fifty-fifty.

  Just then, the doorbell rang. It was a short buzz first, followed by two more, with a gap of a second or two between them. The third ring may have been my imagination, but even if there was no actual sound, there was an echo of the second. I could almost hear the anxiety of the person ringing the bell. I opened the door to a middle-aged woman, seemingly Asian. I say “seemingly” because it was difficult to pin down her ethnic makeup. The parts of her face that seemed Asian were immediately obvious, but it took a little time to figure out which features were different. Perhaps it was the slightly deeper set of her eyes, or the vague blue-gray in her irises, or the partly visible waves in her bangs. She wore a coat that was obviously out of fashion and had been washed so many times the stitches showed. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if cold. When she spoke, I found her English to be quite fluent, with a slight accent.

  “Sorry to bother you. Are you Mr. Ian Ferguson?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Your middle name is Lawrence?”

  I nodded again.

  “During World War II, you were stationed as gunner’s mate first class in Yuehu in southern China?”

  The detailed nature of the woman’s questioning made me suspicious. After so long, the only person who remembered my rank and location that precisely would be the US Navy archivist. Or maybe an FBI agent.

  “Who are you?” I asked warily.

  She didn’t answer, but pulled a two-inch-square wooden box from her pocket. It was covered with a layer of black lacquer. New, it had had a ring of gold flowers on it, but both the black paint and gold flowers were faded by time. I knew it was a woman’s small jewelry box from southern China. She opened the box and pulled something wrapped in tissue paper out and handed it to me. The tissue was also old, marred with years of wrinkles and worries, looking like it might disintegrate at the slightest touch. I carefully unfolded the tissue and found a button inside. Its surface might have been plated with gold or silver, but it had eroded over the years, leaving only a piece of dark metal. Even in its ruined state, you could see its former brilliance.

  “Do you recognize this?” she asked.

  I shook my head blankly.

  “The button is yours,” she said, emphasizing the word “yours.” She went on: “In the fall of 1945, before you left Yuehu, you pulled this button off your uniform and gave it to a Chinese girl.”

  Memories that had been buried deep inside me began to emerge. I felt them crawling through the gullies in my head. The face of a girl gradually emerged, bit by bit, like a puzzle. First eyes, then eyebrows, then the tip of her nose, then the fine line of soft, colorless hair above her lip. Then there was her hair, the hem of a garment . . . wind united all these into one, the kind of wind that comes from a conch shell or the hole of a tree.

  “You said you’d go back,” the woman said.

  The woman’s tone carried neither blame nor empathy.

  “I’m your . . . daughter. Biologically speaking, anyway.” She hesitated on the word “daughter,” as if it had a sharp corner that had caught in her throat.

  A bolt of lightning struck me with terrifying force, catching me off guard, rendering me blind and deaf. I fumbled in the dark, silent chaos for quite some time, feeling the weight of the sky pressing down on me. My body bent to the ground. I should have known at first glance. The blue flash in her eyes, the firm and almost haughty arc of her eyebrows, the trace of a smirk on her slightly upturned lips . . . it was my face refracted in an old mirror, blurred, distorted, and losing its proportions.

  “My wife is sick,” I said, irrelevantly.

  She laughed coldly and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to disrupt your life. I’m not looking for a father. I had a father. Anyone else would pale in comparison. I just wanted to have a look at the person who contributed half of my genes, to see what kind of person he is.”

  What kind of person I was? When I had inadvertently given her life, I didn’t know who I was. And now, more than forty years later, I still didn’t know.

  “She’s sick. My wife. Cancer. She can’t take any . . . stress,” I heard myself stammering helplessly.

  She glanced at me from the corner of her eye, as if I were too small a thing to fill the whole of it.

  “I’m not here for money either. My husband teaches at a university. He has a salary.”

  As she got emotional, her accent floated to the surface, and thorns poked through the outermost layer of her English.

  “Who are you talking to, dear?” Emily called from upstairs, sticking her head out the window.

  I hesitated, then looked up and said, “Someone asking about donations for the Boy Scouts.”

  When I blurted the words out, I sounded very calm. The sense of dread came later, and my heart started beating like a drum.

  “Tell her we already sent a check to the Boy Scouts headquarters,” Emily said.

  I could tell that a la
yer of armor had hardened over the woman’s skin. She’d become a steel plate, with no holes or cracks. She turned and walked down the street, her old-fashioned, freshly washed jacket billowing behind her like a cape. Her shoes against the asphalt sounded as harsh as a steel bar striking granite.

  “What’s your name?” I caught up to her and stopped her.

  She didn’t look at me and just stared at my feet, as if my eyes were inside my shoes.

  “Does it matter? My name—does it matter to you?” she asked.

  I wanted to say it mattered, mattered very much, but my lips were trembling too violently, and I couldn’t speak. She continued walking. After a few steps, she turned back and said a name. It was a Chinese name. The first was Yao, her family name. The final word sounded like the English word “May,” but I didn’t catch the middle word. I wanted to ask her to repeat it, but she was already too far away.

  That was the only clue my daughter, if I could call her that, left me about her identity. For twenty-three years after, I never stopped looking for her. I discovered that looking for someone whose name you don’t know in a place as huge as America was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Later, she found me again. This time, she was a reporter. Perhaps, unconsciously, I was waiting for her to find me before I could leave that world for this one. Three days after we met a second time, I died in my sleep.

  Pastor Billy: What We Took Away and What We Left Behind

  Wikipedia describes a stroke solely in terms of poor blood flow to the brain resulting in cell death. I don’t entirely agree with it, though I was once a doctor. There are many possible descriptions of your condition. For instance, from the perspective of meteorology, the symptoms of stroke are the ruins left by a hurricane sweeping through a complex domain with densely distributed waterways and ravines. From a psychological point of view, a stroke is the process by which a person enduring difficulties blocks a memory he doesn’t want to face, like stemming a flood with sandbags. There can be theological, philosophical, and even biological explanations, but I won’t go into all that. The three of us, me, Liu Zhaohu, Ian—or rather, our ghosts—have rushed from Yuehu to this municipal hospital to see you, so I must use our time sparingly.