But what happened after that was not like a poem or a painting of the fourth level. We were not like nature, as beautifully harmonious as a leafy tree against the sky. We had expected all these things. But the straw made us itch and the floor stank of urine. A rat stumbled out of its nest, and this caused Kai Jing to roll off me and knock Baby Jesus out of his crib. The frog-eyed monster lay next to us, as if it were our love child. Then Kai Jing stood up and lighted a match, searching for the rat. And when I looked at Kai Jing’s private parts, I saw he was no longer possessed. I also saw he had ticks on his thigh. A moment later, he pointed out three on my bottom. I jumped up and was dancing to shake them off. I had to try very hard not to laugh and cry as Kai Jing turned me around and inspected me, then burned off the ticks with the tip of a match. When I took back my blouse from Mary’s head, she looked glad that I was ashamed, even though we had not fulfilled our desires.
As we quickly dressed, Kai Jing and I were too embarrassed to talk. He also said nothing as he walked me to my room. But at the door, he told me, “I’m sorry. I should have controlled myself.” My heart hurt. I didn’t want to hear his apology, his regrets. I heard him add: “I should have waited until we’re married.” And then I gasped and began to cry, and he embraced me and uttered promises that we would be lovers for ten thousand lifetimes, and I vowed the same, until we heard a loud “Shhhh!” Even after we quieted, Sister Yu, whose room was next to mine, kept grumbling: “No consideration for others. Worse than roosters…”
The next morning, I felt like a different person, happy but also worried. Sister Yu had once said that you could tell which girls in the lanes were prostitutes because they had eyes like chickens. What she meant by this, I didn’t know. Did the eyes become redder or smaller? Would others see in my eyes that I had a new kind of knowledge? When I arrived in the main hall for breakfast, I saw that almost everyone was there, gathered in a circle, talking in serious voices. As I walked in, it seemed that all the teachers lifted their eyes to stare at me, shocked and sad. Then Kai Jing shook his head. “Bad news,” he said, and the blood drained from my limbs so that even if I had wanted to run away I was too weak to do so. Would I be kicked out? Had Kai Jing’s father refused to let him marry me? But how did they know? Who told? Who saw? Who heard? Kai Jing pointed to the shortwave radio that belonged to the scientists, and the others turned back to listen. And I wondered: Now the radio is announcing what we did? In English?
When Kai Jing finally told me, I didn’t have even one moment to be relieved that the bad news was not about me. “The Japanese attacked last night,” he said, “close to Peking, and everyone is saying it is war for sure.”
Maku polo this, maku polo that, I heard the radio voice say. I asked: “What is this maku thing?”
Sister Yu said, “The Maku Polo Bridge. The island dwarves have captured it.” I was surprised to hear her use this slur for the Japanese. In the school, she was the one who taught the girls not to use bad names, even for those we hated. Sister Yu went on: “Shot their rifles in the air—just for practice, they said. So our army shot back to teach the liars a lesson. And now one of the dwarves is missing. Probably the coward ran away, but the Japanese are saying one missing man is enough reason to declare war.” With Sister Yu translating the English into Chinese, it was hard to tell which was the news and which were her opinions.
“This Maku Polo Bridge,” I said, “how far away is it?”
“North of here, in Wanping,” Miss Grutoff said, “close to the railway station.”
“But that’s the Reed Moat Bridge, forty-six kilometers from my village,” I said. “When did they start calling it something else?”
“More than six hundred years ago,” Miss Grutoff said, “when Marco Polo first admired it.” And as everyone continued to talk about the war, I was wondering why no one in our village knew the bridge had changed its name so long before. “Which way are the Japanese advancing?” I asked. “North to Peking or south to here?”
Everyone stopped talking at once. A woman stood in the doorway. With the bright sun behind her, she was a shadow, and I could not make out who she was, only that she wore a dress. “Is Liu LuLing still living here?” I heard her say. I squinted. Who was asking this? I was already confused about so many things, now this as well. As I walked toward her, my confusion turned into a guess, then the guess into a certainty. Precious Auntie. I had often dreamed that her ghost would come back. As in dreams, she could talk and her face was whole, and as in dreams, I rushed toward her. And at last, this time she did not push me away. She threw open her arms and cried: “So you still recognize your own sister!”
It was GaoLing. We spun each other around, danced and slapped each other’s arms, taking turns to cry, “Look at you.” I had not heard from her since she wrote me the letter four or five years before. In minutes, we were treating each other like sisters once again. “What’s happened to your hair?” I joked, grabbing her messy curls. “Was it an accident, or did you do this on purpose?”
“Do you like it?”
“Not bad. You look modern, no longer the country girl.”
“No flies circling your head, either. I heard rumors you’re now a high-and-mighty intellectual.”
“Only a teacher. And you, are you still—”
“Wife to Chang Fu Nan. Six years already, hard to believe.”
“But what’s happened to you? You look terrible.”
“I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
I jumped up, went to the kitchen, and brought her back a bowl of millet porridge, some pickles and steamed peanuts, and little cold dishes. We sat in a corner of the hall, away from news of the war, she eating with much noise and speed. “We’ve been living in Peking, Fu Nan and I, no children,” she said between thick mouthfuls. “We have the back rooms of the ink shop. Everything’s been rebuilt. Did I tell you this in my letter?”
“Some.”
“Then you know that the Changs own the business, our family owns only the debt. Father and our uncles are back in Immortal Heart village, churning out ink till it sweats from their pores. And now that they’re home all the time, they have bad tempers and argue constantly among themselves about who is to blame for this, that, and the weather.”
“What about First Brother and Second Brother?” I asked. “Home, too?”
“The Nationalists conscripted First Brother five years ago. All the boys his age had to go. And Second Brother ran off to join the Communists two years after that. Big Uncle’s sons followed, then Big Uncle cursed that all three should never come back. Mother didn’t speak to him until the United Front was formed and Uncle apologized, saying now it didn’t matter which side they were on.”
“And Mother, how’s her health?”
“Remember how black her hair used to be? Now it’s like an old man’s beard, white and wiry. She no longer dyes it.”
“What? I thought it was naturally black from working with the ink.”
“Don’t be stupid. They all dyed their hair—Great-Granny, the aunts. But these days Mother doesn’t care what she looks like. She claims she hasn’t slept in two years. She’s convinced the tenants are stealing from us at night and rearranging the furniture. And she also believes Great-Granny’s ghost has returned to the latrine. She hasn’t had a bowel movement bigger than a bean sprout in months. The shit’s hardened to mortar, she says, that’s why she’s distended like a summer gourd.”
“This is terrible to hear.” Though this was the same Mother who had kicked me out, I took no pleasure in hearing about her difficulties. Perhaps a little bit of me still thought of Mother and Father as my parents.
“What about Precious Auntie’s ghost? Did she ever come back?”
“Not a wail or a whimper, which is strange, since that Catcher of Ghosts turned out to be a fake, not a monk at all. He had a wife and three brats, one of whom was the assistant. They were using the same vinegar jar to catch other ghosts, just opened the lid, sealed it up, over and over. They caught a l
ot of foolish customers that way. When Father heard this, he wanted to stuff the crook in the jar and plug it up with pony dung. I said to him, ‘If Precious Auntie’s ghost never came back, what does it matter?’ But ever since, he’s been muttering about the two ingots he lost, tallying their worth, while according to him was enough to purchase the sky.”
My mind was a sandstorm: If the monk was a fake, did that mean Precious Auntie had escaped? Or was she never put in the jar? And then I had another thought.
“Maybe there never was a ghost because she never died,” I said to GaoLing.
“Oh, she died for sure. I saw Old Cook throw her body in the End of the World.”
“But perhaps she was not entirely dead and she climbed back up. Why else didn’t I find her? I searched for hours, from side to side and top to bottom.”
GaoLing looked away. “What a terrible day that was for you… . You didn’t find her, but she was there. Old Cook felt sorry that Precious Auntie didn’t get a proper burial. He pitied her. When Mother wasn’t looking, he went down there and piled rocks on top of the body.”
And now I pictured Precious Auntie struggling up the ravine, a rock rolling toward her, striking her, then another and another, as she tumbled back down. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
“I didn’t know until Old Cook died, two years after Precious Auntie. His wife told me. She said he did good deeds that no one even knew about.”
“I need to go back and find her bones. I want to bury them in a proper place.”
“You’ll never find them,” GaoLing said. “The cliff broke off again last year during the rainstorms, a ledge the length of five men. Collapsed all at once and buried everything along that side of the ravine with rocks and dirt three stories deep. Our house will be the next to go.”
And I mourned uselessly: “If only you had come and told me sooner.”
“What a pity, I know. I didn’t think you’d still be here. If it weren’t for Mr. Wei’s gossipy wife, I wouldn’t have known you were a teacher here. She told me when I came home for a visit during Spring Festival.”
“Why didn’t you come see me then?”
“You think my husband gives me permission to take a holiday when I want? I had to wait for the way of heaven to throw me a chance. And then it came at the worst time. Yesterday Fu Nan told me to go to Immortal Heart village to beg more money from his father. I said to him, ‘Didn’t you hear? The Japanese are parading their army along the railway.’ Fff. He didn’t care. His greed for opium is greater than any fear that his wife could be run through with a bayonet.”
“Still eating the opium?”
“That’s his life. Without it, he’s a rabid dog. So I went to Wanping, and sure enough, the trains stopped and went no further. All the passengers got off and milled around like sheep and ducks. We had soldiers poking us to keep moving. They herded us into a field, and I was certain we were going to be executed. But then we heard pau-pau-pau, more shooting, and the soldiers ran off and left us there. For a minute, we were too afraid to move. The next I thought, Why should I wait for them to come back and kill me? They can chase me. So I ran away. And soon everyone did, scattering every which way. I must have walked for twelve hours.”
GaoLing took off her shoes. The heels were broken, the sides were split, and her soles had bleeding blisters. “My feet hurt so much I thought they would kill me with the pain.” She snorted. “Maybe I should let Fu Nan think I was killed. Yes, make him feel he is to blame. Though probably he’d feel nothing. He’d just go back to his cloudy dreams. Every day is the same to him, war or no war, wife or no wife.” She laughed, ready to cry. “So Big Sister, what do you say? Should I go back to him?”
What could I do except insist four times that she stay with me? And what could she do except insist three times that she did not want to be a burden? Finally, I took her to my room. She wiped her face and neck with a wet cloth, then lay on my cot with a sigh, and fell asleep.
Sister Yu was the only one who objected to GaoLing’s living with me at the school. “We’re not a refugee camp,” she argued. “As it is, we have no cots to take any more children.”
“She can live in my room, stay in my bed.”
“She is still a mouth to feed. And if we allow one exception, then others will want an exception, too. In Teacher Wang’s family alone, there are ten people. And what about the former students and their families? Should we let them in as well?”
“But they’re not asking to come here.”
“What? Is moss growing on your brain? If we are at war, everyone will soon ask. Think about this: Our school is run by the Americans. The Americans are neutral on the Japanese. They are neutral on the Nationalists and the Communists. Here you don’t have to worry which side wins or loses from day to day. You can just watch. That’s what it means to be neutral.”
For all these years, I had bitten back my tongue when Sister Yu was bossy. I had shown her respect when I felt none. And even though I was now a teacher, I still did not know how to argue with her. “You talk about kindness, you say we should have pity”—and before I could tell her what I really thought of her, I said, “and now you want to send my sister back to an opium addict?”
“My eldest sister also had to live with one,” she replied. “When her lungs were bleeding, her husband refused to buy any medicine. He bought opium for himself instead. That’s why she’s dead—gone forever, the only person with deep feeling for me.” It was no use. Sister Yu had found yet another misery to compare as greater than anyone else’s. I watched her hobble out of the room.
When I found Kai Jing, we walked out the gate and around the back wall of the orphanage to snuggle. And then I told him my complaints about Sister Yu.
“You may not think so, but she really does have a good heart,” he said. “I’ve known her since we were children together.”
“Maybe you should marry her, then.”
“I prefer a woman with ticks on her pretty bottom.”
I slapped his hands away. “You mean to be loyal,” he went on. “She means to be practical. Don’t fight differences of meaning. Find where you mean the same. Or simply do nothing for now. Wait and see.” I can honestly say I admired Kai Jing as much as I loved him. He was kind and sensible. If he had a fault, it was his foolishness in loving me. And as my head floated in the pleasure of this mystery and his caresses, I forgot about big wars and small battles.
When I returned to my room, I was startled to see Sister Yu there, shouting at GaoLing: “As hollow as a worm-eaten tree trunk!”
GaoLing shook her fist and said: “The morals of a maggot.”
Then Sister Yu laughed. “I hate that man to the very marrow of my bones!”
GaoLing nodded. “Exactly my feeling, too.”
After a while, I understood that they were not fighting with each other but in a contest to name the worst insult for the devils who had wronged them. For the next two hours, they tallied their grievances. “The desk that was in my father’s family for nine generations,” GaoLing said, “gone in exchange for a few hours of pleasure.”
“No food, no coal, no clothes in winter. We had to huddle so tightly together we looked like one long caterpillar.”
Later that night, GaoLing said to me, “That Sister Yu is very wise, also a lot of fun.” I said nothing. She would soon learn this woman could also be like a stinging wasp.
The next day, I found them seated together in the teacher’s dining room. Sister Yu was talking in a quiet voice, and I heard GaoLing answer her, “This is unbearable to even hear. Was your sister pretty as well as kind?”
“Not a great beauty, but fair,” Sister Yu answered. “Actually, you remind me of her—the same broad face and large lips.”
And GaoLing acted honored, not insulted at all. “If only I could be as brave and uncomplaining.”
“She should have complained,” Sister Yu said. “You, too. Why must those who suffer also be quiet? Why accept fate? That’s why I agree with the
Communists! We have to struggle to claim our worth. We can’t stay mired in the past, worshipping the dead.”
GaoLing covered her mouth and laughed. “Careful what you say, or the Japanese and Nationalists will take turns whacking off your head.”
“Whack away,” Sister Yu said. “What I say, I mean. The Communists are closer to God, even though they don’t believe in Him. Share the fish and loaves, that’s what they believe. It’s true, Communists are like Christians. Maybe they should form a united front with Jesus worshippers rather than with the Nationalists.”
And GaoLing put her hand over Sister Yu’s mouth. “Are all Christians as stupid as you are?” They were freely insulting each other, as only good friends can.
A few days after this, I found the two of them sitting in the courtyard before dinner, reminiscing like comrades stuck together through the ages like glue and lacquer. GaoLing waved me over to show me a letter with a red seal mark and the emblem of the rising sun. It was from the “Japanese Provisional Military Police.”
“Read it,” Sister Yu said.
The letter was to Chang Fu Nan, announcing that his wife, Liu GaoLing, had been arrested at Wanping as an anti-Japanese spy. “You were arrested?” I cried.
GaoLing slapped my arm. “You melonhead, read more.”
“Before she escaped from the detention center, where she was awaiting execution,” the letter said, “Liu GaoLing confessed that it was her husband, Chang Fu Nan, who sent her to the railway station to conduct her illegal mission. For this reason, the Japanese agents in Peking wish to speak to Chang Fu Nan of his involvement in her spying activities. We will be coming soon to Chang Fu Nan’s residence to discuss the matter.”
“I typed the words,” Sister Yu boasted.
“And I carved the seals,” GaoLing said.
“It’s very realistic,” I told them. “My heart went peng-peng-peng when I read it.”
“Fu Nan will think firecrackers have exploded in his chest,” said GaoLing. She and Sister Yu squealed like schoolgirls.