Tao wondered what Auntie Song was doing just then, and how the garden was faring without him. He looked at the thick plaster shell wrapped around his leg and couldn’t wait to get it off. He was determined to be completely well by the fall planting.
Outside, the hot wind had picked up, the leaves already beginning to fall from the spiny armed branches of the tree, scratching across the stone pavement. Tao shifted in his bed to get a better look out the window. Every spring, his mother had sent him out to the courtyard to pick up the fallen flower petals from the kapok, which she then dried and later boiled into a tea that calmed fevers. In the fall, he gathered the green kapok leaves to be crushed and rubbed on bruised skin. While he recuperated, his ma ma would have to pick up the leaves herself. Tao knew he would forever look upon the tree differently now. Every time he was sent outside to gather the smooth, waxy red petals, or the lance-shaped leaves of the kapok, he would be grateful for their power to heal.
Suyin
Suyin woke with a start. A noise made by a stalking cat or scurrying rat in the alleyway had entered her dreams and pulled her out of sleep. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she would sleep through the night and forget her gnawing hunger. Suyin lay atop her makeshift bed of the rags and straw she had collected, but it still wasn’t enough to ward off the discomfort of the hard ground where she slept tucked away by the back door of the curio shop.
Suyin shifted, the baby a pressing weight. Her back ached and her stomach hurt. If she was hungry, she knew the baby inside her was too, and the thought left her both scared and anxious. She looked around but it was still dark, the moonlight casting the small world around her in shadows. Her tunic was damp with sweat. She never liked the month of August. It was always the most uncomfortable time of the year, the humidity so high her mother had once claimed it made the walls shed tears. Even now, in the dead of night, the air was suffocating, so heavy it felt as if she could actually hold it in her hand.
It was still too early for Suyin to walk over to the main boulevard and rummage through the garbage. She would also have to wait until the marketplace opened, drawing in the morning crowds. The vendors would be more likely to relent and give her something just to get her out of their way, or else they might be too busy to notice her hand reach in from behind their haggling customers to snatch a steamed bun or mango or turnip. She was always cautious, remembering the story of one thief who had his hand cut off by a butcher’s cleaver when he tried to steal a chicken. He wasn’t much older than she was. Suyin never tried to steal anything more than fruits or vegetables; everything else was too precious to come by, keeping the vendors more attentive.
Suyin rubbed her stomach. “Just wait,” she whispered to the baby. “One day we’ll feast on shrimp dumplings, green onion pancakes, and buns filled with red bean.” They were all of her favorites that she could only dream about, but just the thought of it all now made her stomach clench and she swallowed down the sourness. Suyin leaned back in misery. She reached for some of the dry straw and began to chew on it.
Kai Ying
Now that Tao was finally out of the hospital, Kai Ying couldn’t stop watching him. He’s really home, she thought. But was he? The more she studied him, the less sure she was that the same Tao had returned to her. The once boisterous and fearless boy she knew had been replaced by a watchful one who lay quietly in bed, his eyes following her every move. She wondered what he was looking at, or what he was looking for, and how she could help him find it.
The small outward signs of his healing were apparent. There were only faint scratches on his face now, and the fading green purplish tint of the ugly bruises on his body, helped by a cream she applied made from the kapok leaves, was almost gone. The irony of it never failed to cross her mind; the tree from which Tao fell was now helping him to heal. But his hair, closely shorn at the hospital, was still a dark shadow on the pale globe of his head. His thin, bony limbs looked as if they could be easily broken if he moved in the wrong way. Kai Ying’s heart ached.
What she couldn’t say aloud was how Tao reminded her even more of Sheng now, how she imagined her husband with the same shaved head and bony frame at the Luoyang reeducation camp, somewhere in the central plains of China. She treasured his two letters, but she hadn’t heard from Sheng again in over six months, and she found herself in a perpetual state of anticipation. Through the heat of summer, she was frozen, waiting to thaw. There were many possible reasons for his silence, but Kai Ying wouldn’t allow herself to think of them. If she didn’t think of them, they wouldn’t be true. She fought hard not to appear sad in front of Tao. As the months went by, she spoke often of Sheng and read Tao snatches from his letters. But since his fall, he hadn’t asked her once about his ba ba. He hardly said anything at all.
Who was this boy?
* * *
After breakfast each morning, Wei went back upstairs. During Tao’s first week back, she and her father-in-law had taken on their respective roles in his recovery. While Wei was entertaining him with stories about China’s art and history in his calm and steady voice, Kai Ying found it difficult to concentrate on her herb work, which kept her away from Tao most of the day. She listened to her patients and tried to appear concerned and involved, but her mind wandered to her little boy upstairs who had to stay as immobile as possible, held captive by a monstrous cast twice the size of his leg. She didn’t want him shadowed by a limp for the rest of his life. Hadn’t they gone through enough heartache in the past year?
Kai Ying saw these days as a healing time for her father-in-law, too, whose spirits rose every time he was with his grandson. The morning after the incident with the cleaver, Wei had come down to breakfast and apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said, his hands stopping in midair without any other explanation. “I don’t know what came over me.” Kai Ying saw a slight twitching under his left eye. She couldn’t remember his ever apologizing to her, to anyone. “Is everything all right?” she asked. Since Sheng’s arrest, she felt him gradually moving further away from them. He paused for just a moment, before he nodded reassuringly and said, “Everything’s fine.”
The tree had survived. But when they were alone those evenings after they returned from the hospital, she avoided looking directly into his eyes, afraid she would see the look of anguish and defeat in them again. And every time she walked out to the courtyard, she found herself keeping a careful distance from the kapok tree.
* * *
As Kai Ying waited for her next patient to arrive, she heard Tao’s laughter from upstairs. Wei was with him. It was music, a glorious sound coming from her child that filled her with gratitude. For the first time in almost a month, she allowed herself to relax. It was as if she’d been holding her breath ever since Tao’s fall, waiting for what was going to happen next, bracing herself the way Sheng must have to brace himself every morning in order to get through each day.
How proud Sheng would be of Tao. Kai Ying smiled, reached into her pocket, and touched her husband’s two letters; her smile faded. She took one letter out of the envelope as she had a hundred times before, her eyes quickly scanning the all too familiar characters that filled the thin sheets of paper. He spoke sparingly of his life at the camp and the work he was assigned to do there.
Dear Kai Ying,
This is the first letter I’ve been allowed to write since arriving here in Luoyang almost two weeks ago. There was no way to get word to you sooner, but I’m fine and everything will be all right. I was detained at the public security bureau for weeks until it was decided I would be sent to Henan province for reeducation. Then I was told I could write to you after I arrived.
Kai Ying knew Sheng couldn’t write what he was really feeling. His letter would be scrutinized by the authorities before it was sent and he couldn’t risk it not being sent to her. In every line, she heard his voice; in each pause were the words he couldn’t say. From the moment Sheng was arrested, she knew the police had already found him guilty of being a counterrevolutionary. And of cou
rse, the letter he had sent to the Premier’s Office was all the evidence they needed. Others had been sentenced for far less. The police were given full power by the Party to carry out administrative detentions without the assistance of lawyers, or the judicial system, for any disruptive acts as long as they weren’t criminal. The men and women arrested for any type of nonconformist behavior were almost always sentenced to reeducation through labor.
Sheng had once told her of colleagues he knew who were sent away for years to do manual labor, disappearing from their lives as if they had never been there. “They became shadows,” he said. Some were gone for a year or two, while others had still not returned to their families.
* * *
The words of the hated poem suddenly returned to Kai Ying, “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.” She could still hear Sheng’s voice that spring afternoon in 1956 when he returned home from teaching, brimming with news. “The Party has just announced they want to hear from all intellectuals and artists on ways to improve China and the Party,” he told her, breathless, his face flushed with excitement.
“What are you talking about?” Kai Ying asked. She was in the kitchen, making a soup with lily leaf root for Tao’s cough. The steam rose and filled the room.
“Mao is calling it the ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign,’ in hopes of building a stronger China,” he said, unbuttoning his gray Mao jacket. “It’s our chance to step forward and let the Party know what we think. If no one does, how will anything change?”
Kai Ying watched his dark eyes come alive. He sounded so hopeful, happier than she’d seen him in a very long time.
“How can you trust them?” she asked, knowing that Mao and his Party had waged an ongoing persecution of all artists and intellectuals during the past decade. During that time, most intellectuals and counterrevolutionaries met secretly and learned to keep to themselves, having cultivated a constant distrust of the People’s Party. “It’s a trick,” she said. “They won’t suddenly change.” Kai Ying couldn’t understand how Sheng could be so easily fooled by Party rhetoric.
“What if it isn’t a trick?” he asked. Sheng smiled, refusing to let her dampen his enthusiasm. “What if it’s a rare opportunity for change?”
Kai Ying shook her head and remained quiet. She feared that Mao listened only to the sound of his own voice, and she didn’t want Sheng to be fooled. He had stepped closer to her and reached for her hand. As if he knew what she was thinking, he promised to be patient, to wait and see what happened before he became involved in anything. Even then, she wished it would all just go away.
For almost a year, caution prevailed, everyone suspicious that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was just another Mao ploy to weed out the nonconformist intellectuals. But in February 1957, the Party made another plea for participation. Not only had Mao approved of this new vision, but Chou En-lai was also calling for constructive criticism, reiterating the belief that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was needed to make China stronger and better. “We might not trust Mao,” Sheng told her, “but Chou En-lai has always been a man of reason and humanity.” By May, scientists, teachers, and students gradually grew bolder in raising their voices. And what began as careful, guarded steps quickly escalated. Posters by students went up in universities criticizing the Party, their words growing harsher with arrogant confidence as each day passed. “The Privileged Party” was a rallying slogan that sprang up over and over in letters to the newspapers, written accusingly in thick, black strokes on posters, and chanted at gathered forums followed by “The Party grows fat, while the people suffer!”
All of May and June of last year, Kai Ying saw the growing tide as the voices around her rose and anger roiled on both sides. She couldn’t help but worry, knowing that Sheng might be one of those voices. “Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go!” she said to him. He had promised. But he was in and out of a flurry of meetings, even as he was careful never to say anything specific to her about his involvement. Sheng hadn’t told her about the letter he’d written to the Premier’s Office, and so far the authorities had refused her many requests to see it. Was there even a letter? Why had he signed his name? Did he think they wouldn’t find him? Did he really believe some neighbor or colleague or student wouldn’t report his clandestine meetings? Sheng had always been headstrong, but never arrogant. How could he do that to her? How dare he? Within weeks, once the criticism turned directly toward the Party members and Mao himself, the Hundred Flowers Campaign was abruptly halted and all the counterrevolutionaries arrested.
Sheng included.
In the end, the Hundred Flowers Campaign had failed miserably and there was only one school of thought, that which belonged to the Party. Kai Ying should have begged Sheng not to do anything stupid. She should have screamed and cried harder until he listened. But deep down she knew it would have done no good. Now all she could think of was: had Sheng become a shadow? Kai Ying pushed the thought out of her mind and looked down at the letter in her hand.
Luoyang is different. The land is wide and flat and with little green to be seen here. I find myself thinking about the kapok tree, having taken it for granted all the years it bloomed in the courtyard. My entire lifetime and I barely noticed. Here, when the wind blows across the endless plains at night, it sounds like a thousand voices crying out. The days are hot and dry now, and I wonder what the winter will bring. Everything about this place feels extreme. I live in a small room with five others. We work twelve to fourteen hour days in a stone quarry and you might not believe how strong I’ve gotten.
Kai Ying didn’t have to be told that such back-breaking work was grueling and dangerous, tons and tons of rock to be blasted from the mountainsides, carried out, and broken up. It was work that Sheng, a teacher and scholar, wasn’t used to doing. It was work that no human being should be doing. She worried about the multitude of accidents that could happen that had nothing to do with the other everyday constants, the struggle to stay healthy when there was never enough food or rest or adequate sanitation.
Just writing your name makes me feel better, as if you’re somehow closer to me and not all these miles away. Tell my father that I’m well. Tell Tao that I’ll be home soon and we’ll all finally take that trip to White Cloud Mountain. It’s the dream I hang on to each and every day.
* * *
The second letter arrived almost four months later, in February of this year, and all signs of enthusiasm had worn away with the news he wouldn’t be able to come home for the New Year. It was too far. A lifetime away. She and Wei had sent letters, parcels with dried and canned foods using their allotted food coupons, but never heard whether Sheng had received them. Kai Ying had written to him at once after Tao had fallen. She had naïvely hoped the authorities would allow Sheng to come home for a visit. She had hoped for a reply, just a few words, anything that would let her know he was all right. This was what terrified Kai Ying the most; she knew that if Sheng had heard Tao was hurt, he would have written back to her immediately. During her most difficult moments, Kai Ying resurrected the few personal lines from his letters she had committed to memory. Don’t worry, I’m holding up. I miss you all terribly. Will I recognize Tao when I see him again? Will he recognize me? And you? You.
She heard the anguish in his voice.
She wasn’t going to cry.
Wei
After breakfast, Wei climbed the stairs to his bedroom for the book of myths he wanted to show Tao. His room was down the hall toward the back of the villa, larger and cooler during the hot, muggy days. It had once been his mother and father’s room, and later, the room that he and Liang shared. His mother had been his father’s fourth and much younger wife. Even as a boy, Wei thought they looked more like father and daughter than husband and wife. After his father’s first wife passed away, wives number two and three, his aunties, stayed in rooms at the other end of the hall. His older half sisters were married by the time he entered school and he had always felt like an only child growin
g up.
Wei’s father often stood on the balcony and watched him playing in the courtyard below when he was a boy, much as he now watched Tao. He was too young then to realize that he had been the much-longed-for son of a seventy-year-old man.
* * *
Wei looked for the book for Tao. Every wall was stacked with crowded bookcases. Tao had once said his bedroom resembled a library, which Wei supposed it did, and for which he was grateful. The books reminded him of his office at the university, a place he felt safe.
There had once been a real library downstairs in the villa. Now it was used by Mr. and Mrs. Chang as their bedroom. After Liang’s death, the bookcases had been moved up to his room. As a boy, Wei had spent countless hours in his father’s library, sitting in his high-back brown leather chair, reading. His father was often away on business and Wei seriously doubted he had spent much time reading any of the hundreds of books that once lined his bookshelves. So Wei took it upon himself to read them. He smiled now to think how little he’d understood of what he read back then.
Just yesterday morning, Tao had asked him if he had really read all the books on his bookshelf. Wei laughed. “Those are only a handful of what I’ve read,” he answered. “You should see all the books I’ve put away,” he said. “Hidden away.”
“Hidden?” Tao had asked. “Why?”
Wei smiled and leaned closer. “Well, unlike when I was a boy, the government we have now dislikes certain kinds of books.”
“Why would they dislike books?”
“Because all good books are filled with different ideas and truths, and the Party disapproves of books by authors who say something different from what they believe in. They’re afraid we’ll form our own opinions and no longer listen to them. If they find your ye ye’s books, they’ll destroy them.”