Bury What We Cannot Take: A novel

by Kirstin Chen

  San San had never been surer of anything than she was of this: No one was coming back for her. Ma, Grandma, and Ah Liam had left for good. Was her father even ill, or was this yet another of her mother’s lies? The shattered portrait, the inspection, the rushed procuring of exit permits—all these events crashed into place, and she understood what her brother had done. Her heart clenched at the injustice of it all.

  She seized a heavy blue-and-white vase and hurled it on the wood floor, but only succeeded in chipping its lip before it rolled halfheartedly into the wall. She kicked the vase with all her might and stubbed her toe. Shuddering in pain, she wrapped the sheepskin rug about her shoulders, stirring up a cloud of dust that made her eyes itch and relinquish fat, salty tears.

  The next time she opened her eyes, she was blinded by sunbeams shooting through the tall windows. The sheepskin rug was rolled snugly around her like a popiah wrapper. Her throat burned and her tailbone ached. When she tried to lift her head, the room spun, forcing her back onto the floor. Her gaze landed on the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. It was too bright to be five in the morning, but could she really have slept until five in the afternoon?

  She rushed to the windows and freed the velvet curtains from their slings, and then ran through both floors of the house, sealing all the drapes, liberating more swirls of dust that made her sneeze. Her vision blurred, but she pinched her arm until the tears subsided, determined not to waste any more time feeling sorry for herself. She had to find a way to reunite with Dr. Lee and Auntie Rose. For all she knew, they’d already been released. First thing in the morning, she would head to town to uncover news of them, and to do so she needed a suitable disguise.

  She climbed the stairs to Spinster Lin’s spacious dressing room and rifled through drawers and closets. If she tied a scarf over her head and donned a pair of threadbare pajamas, could she pass for someone’s house girl? In her youth, Spinster Lin must have been slender, judging from the row of pastel dresses, the fabric yellowed with age and emitting a faintly rancid odor. Tucked behind the dresses was a leather portfolio of letters that revealed that Spinster Lin had once had a lover, a married Nationalist colonel who had fled with his wife and child to Taiwan. Perhaps that was where Spinster Lin and her mother had gone.

  When night fell, San San decided to sleep right there in the dressing room, for if a former servant or suspicious household registration officer suddenly entered, it would be a while before he thought to look in there.

  She was gathering up the bedclothes from Spinster Lin’s bed when moonlight streaming through a gap in the curtains drew her to the window. The Lins’ still-manicured tennis court lay dormant beneath the pale globe in the sky. How she longed to stick her head through the window and breathe in the cool, fresh air; how she longed to skip across the smooth, unblemished surface of the court.

  Muffled giggles pierced the stillness. San San cracked open the window and squinted into the darkness. Two figures squeezed through a hole in the fence. From their heights, San San guessed they were kids, and then, as they moved out of the shadows and into the court, she recognized the broad forehead and sharp chin of Little Red. San San almost pushed open the window and called out, so excited was she to see her friend. What had drawn Little Red all the way to this side of the islet? Had she heard of San San’s disappearance? Was she worried? Did she miss her?

  But the sight of Steamed Bun, Little Red’s new seatmate, silenced San San. She watched Steamed Bun pick a tennis ball off the ground and hurl it in the center of the sagging net. Their laughter rang out like bells as they tossed the ball back and forth, urging each other to go higher, farther. They must have heard the rumors and come to investigate the abandoned house.

  Little Red found a tennis racket lying in the grass. She positioned herself behind the white line, tossed the ball in the air, and reared back her arm. The racket strings struck the ball with a satisfying thunk, followed swiftly by the sound of smashing glass. Little Red dropped the racket and sprinted to the hole in the fence, with Steamed Bun following close behind. Their shouts were wild and shrill.

  San San went downstairs to the kitchen but dared not go toward the shattered window in bare feet. A burst of wind lifted the muslin curtain, and the tennis ball rolled languidly across the shard-littered tiles. The next time it rained, there would be a big mess.

  That night, San San dreamed that Auntie Rose and Dr. Lee knelt before her and asked her to be their daughter. They completed the adoption paperwork. The official was poised to lower his seal on the final document when the drumbeat of horses’ hooves and the pungent, brackish scent of evil men overpowered them all. The leader of the riders was a slender and sinewy foreigner, naked except for a cloth tied around his waist. He ordered his men to bind Auntie Rose’s and Dr. Lee’s wrists and drag them away. And through it all, they ignored San San’s pleas; in fact, they showed no signs of even having heard her.

  She awoke drenched in sweat, determined to reunite with her piano teacher and the doctor. For the first time since she’d left home, she bathed in very hot water, combed back her hair, and covered her head with Spinster Lin’s rust-colored scarf. She tugged on a pair of worn, earth-toned pajamas, rolling up the pant legs so they wouldn’t trail on the ground. Her reeking cotton blouse and trousers she let soak in the leftover bathwater before finally setting off for town.

  It was midmorning, but here on the islet’s outskirts, the road was all but empty. Occasionally she spied a student hurrying to the arts college or a laborer with a cart of building materials, and she hid behind a tree or shrub until they went by. She passed the islet’s only inn, which housed all visiting dignitaries, and the adjacent seafood restaurant, which, so early in the day, already gave off the intoxicating fragrance of fish tossed on an open grill.

  At the mouth of town, she slowed before the entrance to the cemetery and went inside. Two months had passed since the Clear and Bright Festival, when she and her family had come to clean her grandfather’s grave, and his headstone was now stained with soot. She knelt on the grass and rubbed at the headstone with the heel of her hand.

  Back when Grandpa was still alive, Ma would send San San to his bedroom to call him to dinner. He always beckoned her in, winking as he withdrew a silver-colored cardboard box from a desk drawer. The box was filled with wafer-thin squares of milk chocolate that melted the instant they touched your tongue. San San and Grandpa would each have one, and he’d hold his index finger over his lips to remind her to keep their ritual a secret. Her grandfather would never have let the family leave without her. San San tried to remember if her brother ever went to her grandfather’s room. Could they have had their own secret ritual? Could Grandpa have given Ah Liam something even better than those weightless chocolate squares?

  She was dragging her thumb over her grandfather’s name when something brushed her shoulder. At the sight of the old gravedigger crouched beside her, she cried out.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you, little sister.”

  She scrambled to her feet. The gravedigger had always kept his distance, and she’d never seen his skeletal face up close, his large sunken eyes and scraggly white beard.

  “Don’t be afraid. Why are you here by yourself?” He grimaced, or maybe smiled, and his toothless maw sent San San running for the cemetery gates.

  “Where are you rushing off to?” he called. “I won’t bite.” He cackled at his own joke.

  San San ran until she could hear the bustling hum of the marketplace, and then she slipped into an alley to catch her breath. She began to question her plan. What if her disguise wasn’t good enough? What if she was recognized? She wished she’d thought to smudge her face with dirt and wondered why she’d bothered to bathe.

  The loudspeaker attached to the wall above her head crackled to life and “The East Is Red” spewed forth in tinny streams. The music was soon replaced by the town announcer’s supple voice. “Attention, attention, revolutionary comrades of Drum Wave Islet. Please assemble a
t the high school basketball courts. The denunciation session will start momentarily.”

  San San’s head teemed with the jeers of her classmates. She felt a new pang of sympathy for the criminals who were about to be escorted onto the basketball court’s makeshift stage. But the timing of the session worked to her advantage: once everyone had gathered at the high school, she’d be free to roam the marketplace and study the latest news posters.

  “The East Is Red” resumed playing, urging the townsfolk onward.

  “Who’s being denounced this time?” San San heard a man ask.

  “Who in heaven’s name can keep track?”

  “I think it’s those students. Troublemakers, all of them.”

  When the streets had emptied, San San headed to the marketplace. The wall by the main entrance was plastered with the usual propaganda images of rosy-cheeked peasants and brave soldiers waving their fists in the air. Passing over the slogans urging her to “Be a Sputnik, Not an Oxcart!” and to “Stop American Aggression, Liberate Taiwan!” she searched the news reports and found herself staring at her very own face, rendered in thick black brushstrokes below the words, “Missing Girl, Big Reward.” She ripped down her portrait and tore it into long strips, and then her eyes focused on the poster directly beside the blank space she’d just created. The balled-up strips of paper fell from her hand. On the morning of June 17, this poster declared—tomorrow—the denunciation session and subsequent execution of Lee Chin Kong and Rose Lee would take place. The pair had been found guilty of betrayal, capitalistic deviance, and the kidnapping of a young girl, who remained at large.

  From across town came the faint claps and cheers of those gathered at the high school. Only then did it dawn on San San that the students being denounced must have been the pair who’d attempted to help her escape.

  “Struggle, struggle against the rightists!” the townsfolk chanted.

  For the second time San San ripped the poster off the wall and hurled it on the ground, and then she walked briskly in the direction she’d come, back to the Lin villa.

  Her thoughts tumbled around in her head. She had to turn herself in; it was the right thing to do. But Dr. Lee and Auntie Rose had already been sentenced, and she’d gone through enough with Comrade Ang to know that nothing could change the Party’s mind. Only one thing mattered to those people: to make an example of the criminals. The truth was irrelevant. She had no choice, then, but to leave the islet at once. But the city of Xiamen was vast and inscrutable. How would she survive there? She was just a child; she must seek help—from Cook and Mui Ah? From Little Red? The answers eluded her. She was at a loss.

  As she approached the cemetery, she ducked her head and quickened her pace. She was hurrying past the gates when a cold, rough hand seized her arm.

  She screamed and pulled away, but the gravedigger tightened his grip. “Don’t be afraid. I just want to talk.”

  “Let me go! Help! Help!” Her cries dissipated in the air. Everyone was too busy denouncing criminals to come to her aid.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said. The stale odor of his breath repulsed her. The skin around his purplish lips was bursting with sores.

  San San screamed again and again.

  The gravedigger slapped a hand over her mouth. “Shut up. I said I won’t hurt you. You’re the Ong girl aren’t you? The one they’re searching for?”

  She bit down on his knobby finger as hard she could.

  He shook out his hand and snarled, “Fuck your mother.”

  San San wriggled from his grip.

  “Wait,” the gravedigger said. “Come back!”

  She raced off, pumping her arms and raising her knees, and when she felt the thin fabric of Spinster Lin’s pajamas rip at the seams, she widened her strides and ran for her life.

  18

  Night after night, Ah Zhai tossed and turned in the newly vast four-poster bed, tangling himself in the bedding, darting awake before dawn. Each evening after work, his chauffeur delivered him to Cousin Cynthia’s, where he cajoled and begged the housekeeper to let him see Lulu. But the skinny, sullen servant barred the door, and once, when he’d pushed past her, she’d screamed for the kitchen boy to help. Cynthia herself had appeared at the top of the stairs with her arms crossed over her chest. “Really, Zhai,” she’d said, condescending as a headmistress, “you can’t force her to see you.”

  Like any other couple, Ah Zhai and Lulu of course had their rows. He’d accuse her of behaving like a spoiled child, and she’d fire back that he was ungrateful, hard-hearted, and worse. A few years into their romance, after a particularly ferocious argument, she’d even packed her bags and returned to her uncle’s house. Ah Zhai had fumed and then wept and then resolved to honor Lulu’s decision. She was so beautiful and vivacious and young—he must have been an imbecile to think she’d settle for being his mistress. But less than twenty-four hours later, Lulu had marched through the front door and ordered the maid to unpack her luggage. Ah Zhai gingerly approached, and she melted into his arms, heaving with sobs. He showered her with kisses and held her until she quieted. He would never ask what made her change her mind, and she’d never offer to tell him, but he suspected her uncle had turned her away, that Lulu had realized then that Ah Zhai was all she had.

  In the six years since the border had closed, Lulu and Ah Zhai had never spent a night apart—until now.

  Bleary with fatigue, Ah Zhai made it through the morning by gulping down a steady stream of strong red tea. He pushed aside the documents he’d been struggling to read for the past hour, dialed his secretary’s line, and asked her to bring him a fresh pot.

  “Of course, sir,” Wendy said.

  He heard her move down the hallway in her sensible flat shoes. Unlike the other secretaries, she wore minimal makeup, boxy blouses, and skirts that covered her calves. He appreciated that about her. He disliked people who tried too hard to be something they were not.

  Several minutes later, his secretary returned to her desk outside his office, but instead of bringing him the pot, she fell into conversation with someone who must have been waiting to see him.

  “Please take a seat,” she said. “I’ll let Mr. Ong know you’re here.”

  He glanced at the clock. There were no meetings on the calendar.

  When the phone rang, he asked, “What’s holding you up, Wendy?”

  “Your wife is here, sir.”

  He very nearly dropped the phone. “What in heaven’s name for?”

  Wendy answered evenly, “Well, sir, she didn’t say.”

  Ah Zhai could think of no one he wanted to see less. Dazed with longing for his mistress, he felt, in some strange way, that seeing his wife right then would be a violation of his and Lulu’s love. “She can’t just show up like this.”

  His secretary dropped her voice. “Is that what you want me to tell her?”

  Ah Zhai hung up the phone and trudged to the door. Seok Koon sat in a low leather armchair with her knees held together and her elbows pinned to her sides, as if she were trying to take up as little space as possible.

  Mustering every ounce of energy within him, Ah Zhai said, “Why, Seok Koon, what a pleasant surprise. Do come in.”

  In her bright floral dress, Seok Koon looked almost like a local. Was she wearing lipstick? Had she dressed up just to come to his office? He realized he had no idea how his wife spent her days.

  “Forgive me for barging in like this.” She was careful not to touch him as she entered his office.

  “No need to apologize.” Ah Zhai signaled for his secretary to bring a second teacup with the teapot.

  Once Wendy had shut the door behind her, he poured the tea and said, “So, what brings you by today? How is the boy liking school?”

  Seok Koon batted away his pleasantries. “I must talk to you about San San. Please, Zhai hear me out.”

  He set down the teapot. The air in the room grew suddenly stifling. He stripped off his suit jacket, and she waited for him to drape the garment o
ver the back of his chair before beginning.

  So she’d gone to see that priest of hers again, and together they’d hatched another scheme. He should have guessed as much. This time, though, he had to admit it wasn’t such a crazy plan. Everyone knew the communists were desperate for foreign currency—so much so that they just might take a chance and let his daughter cross the border.

  “All we have to do is make sure the money is in your bank account,” Seok Koon said.

  Ah Zhai forced himself to nod. The loan sharks were out of the question. He’d have to let go of the servants, sell the cars, maybe some of Lulu’s designer furniture. He’d be lucky if all that netted half of what was needed.

  His wife was waiting for a response.

  “It’s not unreasonable,” he said.

  Seok Koon’s eyes welled. She reached in her pocketbook for her handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. “I think this will work, Zhai. I really do.”

  “It’s certainly worth a try.”

  She daintily blew her nose.

  “Now,” he said, “about the funds.”

  She lowered her handkerchief. “Yes?”

  “I’ll just need a few days to get everything in place. A week or two at most.”

  The color drained from Seok Koon’s face. “We can’t prolong this any longer. Our permits have already expired. The servants have taken over the flat. Do you know that the cook has moved into your mother’s bedroom?”

  The words washed over Ah Zhai without sinking in. “You don’t understand the first thing about money.”

  Instead of recoiling, his wife leaned in and pressed both palms flat on his desk, as though ready to reach out and slap him if provoked. He felt himself duck.

  “I’m begging you, Zhai. We must act now. We may already be too late.”