Pearl of China

by Anchee Min

  “What do you think?” Papa asked.

  “Well, what ingenuity!” Rouge remarked.

  Trying to ignore the terrible odor from the chamber pot area, I told Papa that I was impressed.

  “No windows and it is so hot!” Rouge wiped sweat off her face. Her shirt was drenched.

  “Welcome home,” Papa said.

  Rouge and I were given one of the larger sleeping boxes. Rouge tried to slide into the narrow space and bumped her head.

  Before we had a chance to unpack, the sound of knocking erupted. Papa went to open the door. A group of people rushed in. The men were bare-chested and the women wore thin shirts. They all had wooden slippers on their feet. They called my name excitedly.

  “Don’t tell me that you don’t remember me!” said a wrinkled, hunchbacked old lady who grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Lilac?”

  “Yes, I am. Are you Willow?” she cried. “How you have aged! Your hair is gray and white! Is this really you? Where have you been? Where is Pearl?”

  At the mention of Pearl, I broke down.

  “I can’t believe that I have lasted to see you return!” Lilac said. “Here, come meet your aunt Willow!” She turned to her sons. I didn’t recognize the men in front of me, although I knew they must have been Double Luck David and John and their younger brother, Triple Luck Solomon.

  “Where is Carpenter Chan?” I asked.

  “Oh, he is long dead,” said a toothless man.

  “Dead?” I asked, then instantly recognized Carpenter Chan himself.

  “Don’t expect an elephant’s ivory teeth to grow in a dog’s mouth.” Lilac slapped her husband’s back. “Since Absalom’s death, Chan is good for nothing.”

  “When did Absalom leave?” I asked. “And how were his last days?”

  “Old Teacher had a good ending,” Carpenter Chan said.

  “Absalom didn’t suffer?”

  “No, he didn’t. I was with him until the end. Old Teacher delivered his last sermon and went to lie down. Shortly after, I found him sleeping on his bed, and he was with God.”

  A white-haired woman squeezed through the crowd and jumped on me. She scrunched her eyelids together and then stretched them as if trying to open her eyes, but couldn’t. “Guess who I am?” She drew her face so close that I could smell her rotten breath.

  I shook my head and said that I couldn’t recognize her.

  “I am Soo-ching, the beggar lady!”

  “The beggar lady, yes! How are you? What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “I can only see a shadow of you, Willow. I am blind. But I remember your face before you left us.”

  “How have you been?”

  “I am a believer in Jesus Christ,” Soo-ching said. “How is Pearl? Is she here with you? I am upset that you two no longer visit.”

  “Where is Confucius, your son?” I asked.

  “You remember him? Good!”

  “How could I not? He has such a unique name!”

  “He is no longer Confucius,” Soo-ching said. “He changed his name to Vanguard.”

  “Vanguard? Why?”

  “Confucius is no longer a beggar lady’s boy,” Lilac whispered in my ear. “He has become somebody important.”

  “That’s right,” Papa confirmed. “Vanguard was the first person in Chin-kiang to join the Communist Party. He is the town’s boss today.”

  “Donkey shit!” Soo-ching coughed up phlegm and shot it at the ground. “I regret naming him Confucius. He doesn’t deserve it. Willow, you’ll see him soon enough.”

  “How is your husband, Dick?” everyone asked me.

  I hesitated, because I didn’t know how to answer.

  “Oh, my father is well,” Rouge answered for me. “He is busy working in Beijing.”

  Papa sat down and told me how the town of Chin-kiang had changed over the years. “It is a place of exile,” he began. “The government dumps people back in their hometowns once they can no longer be of benefit.”

  Carpenter Chan explained further. “The government seems to think that undesirables should fall back on their native regions and relatives to survive.”

  “It saves prison costs,” Papa said. “We had to build all this ourselves.” He waved an arm indicating the inside of the church.

  Carpenter Chan smiled. “I am still building it.”

  “We are truly under God’s roof now,” Papa said.

  “Chan never learned his lesson,” Lilac said. “We could have stayed in Nanking if he had denounced Absalom. I told him that Absalom wouldn’t mind because he was dead. My stubborn husband wouldn’t do it. So we were sent back to Chin-kiang. What can I complain about? The old rule for a woman has always been: Marry a dog, follow the dog; marry a rooster, follow the rooster. But our children’s future was ruined. In Nanking they would have had opportunities, better schools and better jobs. Here in Chin-kiang, my twins work as coolies, and my youngest son is a field hand . . . They see no brightness in their future.” Lilac began to weep.

  “Who is making that racket?” a man’s voice came from above.

  I raised my eyes and saw three figures crawling out of the sleeping boxes.

  A dark, bearded old man came down a rope. He was followed by two other men. “Damn lousy bones, they won’t stop protesting! This rotten body is falling apart.”

  The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place the speaker.

  The bearded man approached me. He smiled, mocking. “I bet you’d never guess who we are.”

  The other two men echoed, “But we know you and your friend well.”

  I searched the corners of memory but could find nothing that would match the images in front of me.

  The bearded man sighed. “Twenty years in the national prison must have changed my appearance . . . Willow, look hard at me. I am Bumpkin Emperor.” He turned around and pointed at the men behind him. “They are my sworn brothers.”

  “Bumpkin Emperor? General Lobster and General Crab?”

  “Yes, that’s us!” the men cried in unison.

  Papa came and put his arm around the men’s shoulders. “They are with us now.”

  “What do you mean by ‘with us’?” I asked. “Bumpkin Emperor almost killed Absalom, Pearl, Grace, and their children! Absalom would have sent him to hell!”

  “On the contrary, my child, on the contrary.” Papa shook his head. “In fact, it was Absalom’s wish. He made sure that everyone in his church forgave Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers. After all, Christ died for our sins and his Father forgives us.”

  “I don’t believe it, Papa.”

  “Ask Carpenter Chan.”

  “Is it true?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Carpenter Chan nodded. “It was indeed Absalom’s wish.”

  “To forgive Bumpkin Emperor for what he did?”

  “Yes.”

  “God is good, God is fair, and God is kind,” Bumpkin Emperor murmured with tears in his eyes.

  “Absalom is happy with me in heaven!” Papa sang his words. “I converted the three of them.”

  The sound of Sunday service woke me. It took a moment to realize that I was not dreaming. I was inside my sleeping box. I rolled over onto my stomach and stuck my head out to see what was going on. I saw Papa performing a sermon in front of the kitchen stove, which was covered with a white cloth. Papa was dressed in his old minister’s robe, so washed and worn that it looked like a rag, the color no longer black. Papa’s expression was solemn and calm. As he continued speaking, I could hear Absalom in his voice.

  I glanced at the door in fear, and I noticed that it was closed and secured with a thick wooden bar.

  The hundred and nine residents of the old church listened to Papa quietly. They were either sitting on the benches or on the floor or inside their sleeping boxes.

  When Papa finished, people began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Memories of sitting with Carie at her piano rushed back to me. I had never understood the lyrics until now

  ’Twas
Grace that taught my heart to fear,

  And Grace my fears relieved;

  How precious did that Grace appear,

  The hour I first believed.

  Through many dangers, toils, and snares,

  I have already come;

  ’Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far,

  And Grace will lead me home.

  I slid back into my sleeping box. I hadn’t cried when Dick had told me that he had fallen in love with his secretary and had decided to end our marriage. But now I was hit by an emotion that felt like the ocean’s high tide.

  Rouge rolled over and hugged me as I sobbed.

  “You are home, Mama.” She gently wiped my tears. “We are home.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The person in charge of my reform was Chin-kiang’s Communist Party boss, Vanguard, formerly known as Confucius, the son of the beggar lady Soo-ching. Vanguard had grown into a squirrel-faced, cross-eyed, middle-aged man with a fat belly. He enjoyed denouncing me so much that he ordered others to do the same.

  Vanguard pretended that he did not know me. He spoke Mandarin with a heavy Chin-kiang accent, and he was proud of being an illiterate. Since becoming the party boss, he had banned the worship of God and made it a crime to mention the names of Absalom, Carie, and Pearl.

  When Vanguard learned that Pearl had won the Nobel Prize, he saw an opportunity to advance his political career. He invited Mao’s favorite journalists to Chin-kiang to tour the hometown of the notorious American cultural imperialist. The event caught Madame Mao’s attention. Vanguard was summoned to the Forbidden City to be honored as “Chairman Mao’s great foot soldier.” Madame Mao awarded Vanguard with a work of her calligraphy that read, “The hope of launching a cultural atomic bomb on the world’s Capitalism rests on your shoulders.”

  Vanguard called me “the evil twin sister of Pearl Buck” and “Chin-kiang’s shame.” He encouraged children to call me scum. He ordered me to clean out the town’s sewage drains and public restrooms daily. Every Friday afternoon I reported to Vanguard to confess my crimes. Depending on my response, Vanguard would either pass or fail me. If he was displeased, he would add more to my workload. He might order me to clean his office, which was the former British Embassy. If he felt I needed further humiliation, he would order me to walk through the town banging a chime with a stick. I was instructed to shout, “Come and see the American running dog!”; “Down with Willow Yee!”; and “Long live the proletarian dictatorship!” Vanguard hated it when I protested by staring at him in silence.

  “I can have you tortured, you know,” he threatened constantly.

  Vanguard expected me to tell him the details of my relationship with Pearl Buck.

  “I want you to trace back all the way to your childhood,” he ordered.

  Papa taught me to forget about preserving my dignity. “Speak the wolf’s language!” If he were me, Papa said, he would toy with Vanguard.

  I tried, but it didn’t work. Vanguard was determined to please Madame Mao. He didn’t buy my abstractions and empty words. “How dare you try to fool the Communist Party!” he yelled at me.

  To pressure me further, Vanguard organized rallies. They took place in the town’s square. The crowd repeated after Vanguard as he shouted, “Confess or be tortured to death!”

  While Vanguard pulled my hair back to show the public my “evil features,” I imagined the opera The Butterfly Lovers. I remembered every detail of Pearl and me going to see the performance together with NaiNai. When Vanguard used a whip to beat me, I saw the birds, bees, and dragonflies flying into Absalom’s church. When the blood came and pain burned inside my body, I heard Carie singing her favorite Christmas song, “What Child Is This?”

  In my dreams, I visited Pearl in her American home. The furniture I imagined for Pearl was made of red sandalwood in the style of the Chinese Ming dynasty. I saw the pictures on her walls, beautiful Chinese brush paintings and ink calligraphy. Also, I dreamed of Pearl sculpting. It was something she had said that she would love to learn. We used to watch Chin-kiang’s craftsmen making cookie figures out of sugared flour. For three pennies, we bought our favorite colored animals and opera figures. At our playground behind the hills, Pearl once sculpted a mud head using me as a model, and I did one of her. To emphasize our individual characteristics, I made her nose high and she slanted my eyes. Both faces were smiling because we couldn’t help laughing while making them.

  I dreamed of Pearl’s play stove, a real one built by Carie’s gardener. It was located behind the hillside. It was there that we cooked real food. Wang Ah-ma taught us to bake yams and roast soybeans and peanuts. I could still hear the sound of Pearl and me chewing beans as if our teeth were made of steel.

  Since moving back to Chin-kiang, I had been praying with Papa. Vanguard had no power over my spiritual being. My resistance against the Communists grew stronger. I decided to try to bore the crowd with my confessions, filling and padding them out with Mao quotations, slogans, and self-name-calling. My typical first sentence would be “I was a cat that lost her way before I was guided back home by Chairman Mao’s teaching.” My second sentence would be “Although I have never read a word of The Good Earth, my desire to read the book is absolutely reactionary and criminal.”

  After Vanguard’s lectures and criticisms, it was my task to lead the crowd in shouting, “Burn, fire, fry, and roast Willow if she doesn’t surrender!” To amuse myself, I created variations. “Down with Willow Yee” became “Down with the American running dog Willow Yee!” and then “Down with the big liar, big traitor, big bourgeoisie, big snake, and big rotten, assless, slummy, and poisonous spider Willow Yee!” I began to play with the crowd’s breath. I dragged the sentences out as long as I could. I invented slogans to shout as breathing exercises. My favorite only a few could follow: “Long live our great leader, great teacher, great helmsman, great leader Chairman Mao’s great, glorious, and forever correct revolutionary line!”

  In the winter, Vanguard conducted a political rally in the former British Embassy’s ballroom. The crowd was ordered to sit on the floor for hours on end. As I confessed, men smoked cigarettes and played cards, while women sewed their clothes and knitted. Old people napped and babies screamed. Vanguard insisted that my confessions were not heartfelt. He concluded that I purposely resisted reform and ought to be further punished.

  I was put to work as the town’s slave.

  To those who were sympathetic toward me, Vanguard warned, “The word mercy doesn’t exist in our proletarian dictionary!”

  When Vanguard decided to lead Chin-kiang to “enter Communism overnight,” he eliminated the use of chamber pots. Everyone was to use the public restrooms, but because restrooms didn’t belong to anyone, no one cleaned them. They became a breeding ground for maggots, flies, and mosquitoes. It became my responsibility to clean them.

  I labored day and night. Rouge helped when she could. Her old job as a textile worker had been given to a relative of her boss, and now she worked as a concrete mixer for a construction company. Close to the Chinese New Year in 1970, Rouge was ordered to work both the night and day shifts. I made my rounds of the public restrooms alone. As my tired hands scrubbed the walls of the feces-filled pits, I felt helpless and exhausted. I asked myself, “What is the point of going on?”

  I had to restrain myself from crying or I would wake everyone. Papa was asleep. Rouge was working. The shadow of Dick’s secretary-nurse would not leave me alone. I had finally learned her name, Daisy. My mind’s eye saw that she had a full-moon face, big eyes, and a cheery mouth. She and Dick were embracing in the bed that used to be mine.

  “Papa,” I called.

  No answer.

  I got up, climbed down, and landed on the floor. Papa was not in his sleeping box.

  I went searching for him. I checked the washing area and the dining area. Passing the stacked firewood and coal buckets, I arrived in the kitchen. I heard a noise over my head. It came from the storage area behind the kitchen. S
tanding still, I listened carefully. It was the sound of a radio—someone was tuning through the channels.

  Like an old monkey, I climbed the rope ladder. My legs were shaking and I was out of breath. I lost my balance and my shoulder hit the storage door.

  The radio stopped.

  After a long moment of silence, the door opened.

  Holding a candle, Bumpkin Emperor stuck his head out. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am looking for Papa.”

  “He is not here.”

  “I heard the sound of a radio. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Don’t make me wake up everyone,” I threatened.

  “I said no.”

  “Let me in, please.”

  “No.”

  “You are hiding something, aren’t you?”

  “It’s none of your business . . .”

  “Let me in!”

  “Don’t make me push you . . .”

  “Willow!” Papa’s voice came from inside.

  Bumpkin Emperor pivoted his body, and I entered.

  Papa’s face was lit by candlelight. He was holding a brick-sized box. It was a radio of a fancy make, better than the one Dick had owned. Papa turned the radio dial. Static filled the shadowy room. The scene reminded me of a propaganda film in which criminals gathered in conspiracy. Papa was in his pajamas. He was calm and focused. I had never seen him concentrating like this. He tilted his head to the side as he searched for a signal and listened. I looked around and saw more faces. Besides Bumpkin Emperor and his sworn brothers, there were Carpenter Chan, his sons, and a few others. They all looked nervous but excited.