by Su Tong
I saw that there was a pot of water in the registration room giving off puffs of steam, and that the water was boiling over a little. The several red flags and the portrait of Mao Zedong on the wall seemed damp and hazy. Beneath her desk, the woman was making some kind of mechanical movement with both hands; occasionally she looked at me askance. I very much wanted to know what she was doing and so, supporting myself on the sill, I jumped up to see. One pale hand gripped a circular embroidery frame, while the other pale hand held a needle and thread. I even saw the red flower on the white silk; a large, half-finished red flower.
‘What are you doing?’ The woman had noticed my hop, and with an action that was almost fearful, she threw down the things in her hands. Then she stuck out one hand to grab me by the arm, but I managed to escape her. Something ferocious lit up in her eyes as she picked up a piece of chalk from her desk and threw it at me, and with great anger in her voice she said, ‘You little spy! You little mole! Nasty brat! Get lost!’
I ran to the other side of the road. I thought the woman very weird: weird for secretly embroidering under the office desk and weird for her volcanic anger. What did I care what she was hiding her hands for? She was just embroidering a flower. Why did she have to do it on the sly? If I had known she was just embroidering, I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to look. The problem was that she didn’t know what I had had in mind. In fact, when I had lifted myself up to look at her hands, I had hoped to see a playing card; maybe even the Q of Hearts.
And so it was that the first time I went to Shanghai, I was filled with an immense sense of loss. My father took me by the hand and walked me angrily through the streets. He said, ‘Playing cards! Playing cards! Don’t you know that’s the feudocapitalistic plaything of revisionists? A very bad thing!’
I am now certain that the hostel we stayed in on that occasion was near the Bund or the Huangpu River, because during the night I heard the great Customs House clock strike and the sound of whistles from the little steamboats and cargo ships. I also remember that there were three beds in the hostel, and over each bed was hung a tent-like mosquito net which would usually be for summer use. Besides my father and me, there was another man with a northern accent and a full beard as hard as hog bristles.
Initially, I slept by myself in one bed. The light was on, and outside my window, the wail of the city descended into darkness. I couldn’t see anything outside; I could only see through the mosquito net to the wall of the room. The wall was off-white, and on it was a Patriotic Hygiene Month propaganda drawing. It seemed to me that the man grasping a fly-swatter on the drawing looked a lot like Cathead from our street – Cathead might also have been connected with the stolen Q of Hearts, another likely suspect – and so I pondered the question of Cathead and the Q of Hearts. Then suddenly I saw the bloodstain. It was like a map that had been printed on the wall, right against the mosquito net and only a palm’s width from the edge my pillow.
‘There’s blood on the wall!’ I cried out loudly to my father, who was lying on the next bed over.
‘What blood?’ My father raised himself up slightly on his bed and gave it a cursory glance. ‘It’s mosquito blood,’ he said. ‘Someone killed the mosquitoes in summer and the blood stuck to the wall.’
‘It’s not mosquito blood.’ I examined the bloodstain with no little fear. ‘Who ever heard of so much blood coming from a mosquito?’
‘Don’t worry about it. Close your eyes and have a good sleep. They’ll turn off the light in a second,’ my father said.
I saw the hog-bristle man extract himself from the mosquito net. He ran over to my bed in a few steps and lifted the mosquito net up over my bed. ‘You mean this bloodspot?’ First he glanced at me, and then he directed his shining gaze at the bloodspot on the wall. I saw him make an alarming action: he put his index finger in his mouth and kept it there for a moment. Then, he cold-bloodedly extended it to scrape off some of the blood before returning it to his mouth. Next I saw him frown slightly and spit on the floor.
‘It’s human blood.’ He jumped back into his own bed and chuckled from inside the net. ‘Human blood. As soon as I saw it, I knew that’s what it was.’
For a moment, the dread made my heart beat madly in my breast and I threw myself into my father’s bed and said nothing, covering myself under his blankets.
‘It must have spurted up from someone’s head; I could tell as soon as I saw it,’ the hog-bristle man said. ‘If you use an awl to crack open someone’s head, that’s exactly what the blood looks like when it spatters on the wall. And if you swing your belt at someone it’s about the same. I could tell as soon as I saw it. They must have detained somebody here.’
‘Impossible. This is a hostel,’ my father said.
‘You think you can’t detain people in hostels?’ The hog-bristle man emitted another contemptuous laugh and said, ‘I guess you haven’t been around for much of all this. They detained someone in our unit’s bathhouse, and the blood there isn’t on the wall, it’s on the ceiling. On the ceiling! Do you know how human blood gets on a ceiling? If you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, you’ll never guess.’
‘Never mind that. I’m with my son.’ My father said, interrupting his monologue. ‘I’m with my son and kids are easily frightened.’
Then the man stopped speaking. The lights were turned off and the hostel rooms suddenly sank into darkness. Even the bloodspot on the wall fell into the oblivion. Except for an unclear whitish glare, I could see nothing on the walls now. I heard the hog-bristle man on the bed across from me snoring thickly, and then my father started snoring too.
Kids are easily frightened. The whole night I clasped my father’s arm, imagining the events that had happened in the hostel, imagining one person bleeding and another one holding an awl or a belt. For a long while I couldn’t fall asleep. I remember clearly being in Shanghai and hearing the midnight toll of a clock and thinking that it must be the sound of the famous clock on the Customs House.
The next day there was no sun in Shanghai, and the sky looked like a greyish iron sheet covering the tops of the high buildings and telephone poles. My father, grasping a slip of paper, took me back and forth through an enormous emporium. On the paper was a list of knitting wool, bedsheets, leather shoes including sizes, plus other such products – a list entrusted to my father by my neighbours, for him to make purchases on their behalf. In that building, which still held obvious traces of colonial taste, the people were as many and as jumbled as the goods for sale. At the leather shoes counter, I very nearly lost my father. I had gone up to the stationery counter, mistakenly thinking that a box of paper clips might contain playing cards. When I returned, crestfallen, to sit on the shoe-trial stool, I saw that the person sitting next to me was no longer my father, but a stranger in a blue woollen tunic suit.
At this point I opened my mouth wide, stood on the chair and wailed. My bewildered father rushed over, threw down what he was carrying and gave me a couple of spanks. He said, ‘I told you not to run off, and what did you do? How many times have I told you? This is Shanghai. If you get lost, no one will find you.’ I said that I hadn’t run off, I had been looking for some cards. My father made no further recriminations, but took me by the hand, and in silence we set off towards the exit. ‘There aren’t any cards in Shanghai, either,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Maybe you can get some in the little towns and villages. When I get sent to Jiangxi I’ll take a look for you, OK?’
To cheer me up my father took me to the banks of the Huangpu River to look at the boats. When we reached the river, a slushy rain began to fall and there were few pedestrians along the Bund. We walked along the iron railings, and I saw for the first time the river heading out to sea. The water was a greyish yellow with ripples of oil; I was thoroughly disillusioned, for it was the complete opposite of what I had imagined. I also saw a great many gulls, with their slender, nimble wings; their cries were a hundred times more sonorous than those of the sparrows outside our eaves in the
trees of Mahogany Street. It was the boats that excited the most profound excitement though, both those moored and those moving about the river; their masts, portholes, smokestacks, anchor posts, not to mention the colourful flags whistling in the wind. It seemed to me that they were no different from those I had drawn in my sketchbook.
After that, it was just rain and snow swirling down onto the Shanghai streets, all the way until my father climbed onto the short-distance train, which was the abrupt conclusion to my Shanghai trip. Also, the wretched weather made the afternoon darken prematurely, and my impressions of the road home are of gloom and cold.
The carriage was almost entirely empty, and every wooden seat seemed to exude its own chill. We started off sitting in the middle of the carriage, but one of the glass windows had been shattered and so my father led me to the back, near the bathroom, where the faint smell of piss could be detected, but it was warmer. I recall that when my father took off his blue woollen tunic suit to drape over me, I asked him, ‘Isn’t there anyone on the train? Just us two?’ and my father said, ‘The weather’s bad today and it’s a slow train, so there aren’t so many people.’
Just as the train was about to depart, four men suddenly boarded. Carrying with them the outside chill they burst into the carriage; the three young men were wearing padded army overcoats, and only the old one, who was wearing a gauze mask, had on a blue cotton tunic suit like my father’s. As soon as they came in I knew that it was snowing hard, for I saw that their hats and shoulders were covered in large flakes.
This is what I wanted to tell you about: these sudden arrivals, especially the man in the mask, who was constantly being pressed and jostled by the three others. They passed us and chose the seats in the middle of the carriage, where we had been sitting before; they didn’t seem to mind the cold. I saw the old man sitting between two of his companions. He began to turn his head towards us, but before he could finish this movement his grey head was jerked back by something. Across two rows of seats, I could see his stiff back; one of the others took his hat off to shake the snow off, but that was all – I didn’t hear them speak a single word.
‘Who are they?’ I asked my father.
‘I don’t know.’ My father, too, watched detachedly, but he wouldn’t let me stand up to have a closer look, just saying, ‘Sit down. You’re not allowed to walk over there; and don’t stare.’
The train sped through the wind and snow of 1969, along open country. Outside the window was almost nocturnal darkness, and a thin cloth of snow already lay on the idle winter fields. My father told me to look at the snowy landscape outside, so I peered out of the window. Suddenly, I heard a sound in the car. It was the four of them standing up; the three wearing overcoats clustered around the old man in the mask. They walked into the aisle towards us and I quickly realized they were heading to the bathroom. What astonished me, however, was the man in the mask. He was being propped up and pushed forward and as he glanced from behind his companions’ shoulders, he was staring at my father and me. I saw his tears clearly; the old man in the mask had eyes filled with tears!
Although my father pulled me forcefully towards the window, I nevertheless saw how three of them entered the bathroom, and that one of them was the masked old man. One of the young men stayed outside the door; he wasn’t much older than my brother but he threw me a frosty glance that frightened me. I drew back my head and quietly told my father, ‘They’ve gone into the bathroom.’
Three of them went into the bathroom, but the old man in the mask did not come back out, only the two young men. Then I heard the three men in overcoats whisper to one another as they stood by the carriage links. I couldn’t help but turn my head towards them, and what I saw was how the three men in overcoats, one of whom was straightening out his collar to protect his ears, opened the door to the next carriage and disappeared from my field of vision.
I didn’t know what had happened to the old man with the mask. I wanted to have a look in the bathroom, but my father wouldn’t let me move a muscle, saying, ‘Sit down. You can’t go anywhere.’ It seemed to me that my father’s manner and voice were very nervous. I don’t know how much time went by before the conductor led a cultural propaganda team into our carriage, carrying drums, gongs and copper cymbals. Only then did my father relax his grip on my hand, which he had been holding throughout. He sighed with relief and asked, ‘You need to go to the bathroom? I’ll take you.’
The bathroom door was unlocked and as we opened it a fierce gust made me shiver. With one glance, I saw that the little bathroom window was open and that wind and snow were blowing in. There was no one in the bathroom. There was no masked old man.
‘The old man isn’t here,’ I cried out. ‘Why isn’t he in here?’
‘Who’s not here?’ my father asked, avoiding my eyes. ‘They went into another carriage.’
‘The old man isn’t here. He was in the bathroom,’ I yelled. ‘How come he isn’t here?’
‘He went into another carriage. Don’t you have to pee?’ my father said, looking at the swirling snow outside the window. ‘It’s so cold here; hurry up and take a pee, all right?’
I did have to pee, but suddenly I saw that on the wet, grimy floor was a playing card. If I tell you, no doubt you won’t believe me, but it was a Q of Hearts. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was a Q of Hearts, the very Q of Hearts I had lost and been unable to find. I’m sure you can imagine what I did – I bent down and picked up that card from the ground or, to be more accurate, I scraped it up and wiped the muddy snow off it. I waved it at my father, ‘The Q of Hearts! It’s the Q of Hearts, the one I needed!’ I remember how my father’s expression altered rapidly – astonishment, confusion, shock and fear – but in the end it was nothing but fear; in the end my terrified father snatched the Q of Hearts out of my hand and threw it with one gesture out the window, yelling confusedly, ‘Throw it out! Hurry! Don’t just hold it, blood! There’s blood on the card!’
I would wager that there wasn’t one trace of blood on that card, but on the other hand, it isn’t as if my father had been speaking deliriously, either.
That 1969 trip to Shanghai acquired in my memory a mysterious postscript – the old man in the mask, the Q of Hearts. Through my entire childhood, my father refused to discuss what happened on the train, and for that reason I’ve always believed that the man on the train must have been mute. Only a few years ago, when my father was able to talk about events now long in the past, did he correct this error in my memory. ‘You were still a kid then, you couldn’t tell,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t mute. No way he was a mute. You didn’t see it, but the mask was moving – his tongue, his tongue had been . . . they had . . . had . . .’
My father didn’t finish his sentence. He couldn’t; his eyes filled with tears. I didn’t need to say anything more, either, and the truth is that I don’t much like to dwell on these things any more than he does. Over the years I have often recalled the tears of the old man on the train, and when I recall those tears, I suffer.
In any case, the Q of Hearts was just a card. I still like to play poker with my cards, and every time I pick up a Q of Hearts, I feel like the card has some kind of singular import – no matter whether it’s a good move or not, I don’t let the card out of hand lightly. I don’t know why, but I’m used to playing it last.
Home in May
Yongshan was taking her son back to Licheng to visit relatives, but when she reached her brother Yongqing’s house, she discovered he had recently moved away.
Some of her relatives had passed on, others had left the city, and yet more had simply grown distant. Her younger brother was the last of her close relatives in Licheng, so as you can imagine, his disappearance deeply embarrassed Yongshan in front of her son. Her brother’s home was totally empty – Yongshan could see that through the round hole where the lock had been. The narrow parlour was quite dark and the only thing that could be clearly seen was a broken white toilet; perhaps it had broken when they’d attempted t
o take it out, so her brother had left it there, a shining white ring. Out of sheer disappointment or fury, Yongshan beat heavily on the door. But a few knocks was not enough to calm her frustration, so she switched hands and beat the door even more. Her son let go of the rolling suitcase and sat down on it.
‘They’ve moved out. What’s the point of knocking?’ he said, looking calmly at his mother. ‘Don’t your hands hurt when you go at it like that?’
A neighbouring couple came out of their apartment, obviously confused about the connection between these two people and their former neighbour. The man asked her, ‘Are you related to him?’
‘I’m his sister,’ she answered.
The woman standing behind her husband looked Yongshan over and said, ‘You mean cousin? On which side?’
Yongshan, understanding the meaning of the couple’s doubtful looks, answered quietly, ‘Not cousin. I’m his older sister.’ She blushed as soon as she finished speaking, for she knew her tone made it sound like she was lying. The neighbours asked no further questions, but suggested to Yongshan that she should call her brother’s cell phone. Her answer was, ‘I called the number, but it’s out of service. Maybe I wrote it down wrong.’ The woman then suggested that Yongshan enquire at the gas company, because if she remembered correctly that was where he had worked. Yongshan smiled confidently and corrected her, ‘Not the gas company; the water company. I know that. My brother called me back in January to wish me a happy new year.’
Then they went downstairs. Her son took the suitcase and walked behind his mother, but rather than rolling it properly he began to drag it so that it grated against the cement steps. ‘You don’t have to take it out on the suitcase!’ Yongshan shouted, looking behind her, ‘It’s new!’
Her son said, ‘Oh, so now I’m taking it out on the suitcase? You’re the one getting all worked up, not me.’
