Bury What We Cannot Take: A novel

by Kirstin Chen

  Bee Kim’s throat tightened. Chin Kong’s last words to her daughter-in-law reverberated in her head: “We only ask that you remember us later, when you’re in a position to help us.”

  Mrs. Lao nodded knowingly. “I really don’t understand how all these intelligent, educated people could have stayed behind.”

  “Not everyone had a choice,” Bee Kim snapped.

  Mrs. Lao’s plain, square face took on a wounded expression. She looked down at her tiles.

  Mr. Ng discarded his wind tile, and Madame Tay’s gnarled hand, the only part of her that wasn’t immaculately preserved, pounced like an iguana’s tongue. “Fishing.”

  The remainder of the game passed in a blur. Bee Kim mechanically chose a tile, discarded another. She didn’t understand how this could have happened to Chin Kong and Rose—unless they’d been caught trying to flee. But why would someone as powerful and connected as the doctor attempt something so risky? Bee Kim remembered a long-ago article in the People’s Daily, which reported that the head doctor at a top Beijing hospital had been banished to a labor camp for twenty years for misdiagnosing Madame Mao. She could only guess at the kind of pressure Chin Kong faced.

  Mr. Ng nudged Bee Kim’s elbow. “Your turn.”

  She tossed a tile in the center pile.

  Again Madame Tay pounced and sang, “Mah jong!”

  Bee Kim pushed back her chair and waved for her maid, who was sitting with the other servants in a circle on the floor in the back corner of the hall.

  “Where are you going?” said Mrs. Lao. “Stay for one more round.”

  “Yes, stay,” Madame Tay said, while Mr. Ng shrugged indifferently.

  Bee Kim insisted she must be off, took her maid’s arm, and prepared to go out in the rain.

  All the way home, she debated what to tell Seok Koon. There was no way of knowing the accuracy of Madame Tay’s news, and, even if an execution had taken place, who could say for sure that Chin Kong and Rose had been the victims? The islet had several doctors, several pianists, too. Bee Kim thought of all the young women in Seok Koon’s graduating class. A few of them could have married doctors, and that was just one class!

  There was one line of questioning Bee Kim refused to pursue: what Chin Kong’s and Rose’s deaths might mean for her granddaughter. Thank heavens Seok Koon and Zhai had another rescue plan in the works, one that Seok Koon insisted was practically risk-free.

  Back in the flat, Bee Kim settled into her chair with her needlepoint to await her daughter-in-law’s arrival. She would break the news as gently as possible. “This is just a rumor,” she’d say. “The woman who told me is an incurable gossip.”

  The front door opened. Bee Kim heard Seok Koon drop her pocketbook on the table in the entryway, even though she’d repeatedly warned her daughter-in-law that until they were sure the servants could be trusted, she shouldn’t be so cavalier.

  Bee Kim sewed the last stitches of a pale-pink lotus flower, put down her needlepoint canvas, and waited. But Seok Koon rushed past the sitting room without stopping.

  “Daughter-in-Law,” she called.

  Seok Koon backtracked and entered, a dazed expression on her face. “I didn’t expect you to be home already.” Her hair was windswept, her skirt, wrinkled and streaked with mud.

  “What happened to you?”

  Seok Koon’s mouth dropped open but no sound emerged. She covered her face with her hands and said in a muffled voice. “I’m sorry, I have a splitting headache. I really must lie down.” She turned to leave.

  “Wait,” said Bee Kim.

  Her daughter-in-law obeyed.

  But how could she reveal the news now? “The girl,” she said. “Everything is in place? When will we hear about her permit? When will she arrive?”

  Flatly Seok Koon said, “Nothing is in place. Absolutely nothing.”

  Bee Kim sat up. Never before had she seen her so defeated. “What does that mean? What more must we do?”

  Seok Koon shook off her stupor. Her shoulders rose to her earlobes. Her hands formed fists. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “What are you saying, Daughter-in-Law?”

  Seok Koon stepped into the room. She towered over Bee Kim. “That we never should have left her. That we may never get her back.”

  She fled down the hallway, and Bee Kim let her go. She sat with her hands in her lap, weathering the terrible pounding in her chest. What would her own mother have said? That you couldn’t expect a sugarcane stalk to be sweet on both ends, that you had to sacrifice one thing to get another. But the pounding failed to cease. If only she had someone else to talk to. If only she could call Hua. All of Hua’s grandchildren lived abroad, so she’d doted on Ah Liam and especially San San. Once, when Bee Kim complained about the girl’s stubbornness, Hua had burst out laughing and said, “She takes after you! Someday she’ll grow into a stern but loving grandma to grandchildren of her own.” Bee Kim tried to picture her gangly, tomboyish granddaughter as a young lady. How much had she grown in the past month? Who would tell Mui Ah to have the seamstress come by to make her new clothes? Who would buy her new shoes? Who would sit by her bedside, telling her stories until she fell asleep? She clasped her hands over her chest and wondered if she was suffering a heart attack. When the pain finally eased, she took up her needlepoint canvas and began where she’d left off.

  A fat orange carp was taking shape beside the lotus flower when her grandson trooped in from school.

  “Grandson, come greet your grandma,” Bee Kim called. She wanted to tell him everything—the alleged execution, the dangers San San now faced. Once and for all, he would see what his beloved Party was capable of. But just in time she stopped herself. Her grandson was still a boy, and she could not burden him so.

  Ah Liam appeared in the doorway. “Mahjong got done early?”

  How smart he looked in his gray tie and matching trousers, his broadening shoulders straining ever so slightly against the shirt seams. Her own mother would have reminded her not to neglect the people standing right beside her for the ones she had lost. She gestured at the settee across from her. Her grandson hesitated, a list of excuses plainly running through his head, and then put down his satchel and joined her.

  “How was your mathematics test?” she asked.

  “I got a ninety-seven.”

  “Smart boy,” she said.

  “Is my ma home?” he asked.

  Bee Kim said meaningfully, “She’s resting.”

  Ah Liam interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles, a nasty habit he’d recently picked up.

  “Tell me more about this new school of yours,” said Bee Kim.

  “What do you want to know?”

  Bee Kim sighed. Her grandchildren had once told her everything, seated around the dining room table, enjoying French pastries for tea. She saw a very young San San kneeling on her chair to reach the pastry box at the center of the table. The girl pushed a strawberry tart into her small mouth, as though afraid someone would take it away from her, and the red jelly stained her lips and cheeks like clown paint.

  She batted away the image and said, “Tell me about your friends, your teachers.”

  “I mostly hang out with older kids,” Ah Liam said. “The ones in my class are so immature.”

  This made her smile. “Do you miss the sweets we used to buy on the islet? I’m sure there’s a decent French bakery around here.”

  The boy scratched his ear. “I always have a snack at school.”

  “Never mind, then. It was just an idea.”

  He leaned forward like he was about to make an excuse to leave, but then said, “Remember the summer program I was telling you about? To study English?”

  “Have you decided to join?” Zhai was right; school was good for the boy.

  Ah Liam said he had and that he needed to pay the fees at the first session the following afternoon. He tilted his head in the direction of Seok Koon’s bedroom. “I would ask my ma, but I don’t want to disturb her.”r />
  “Yes, don’t disturb her,” Bee Kim said. “You know how she is when those headaches strike.” She reached in her pocket and withdrew the fat wad of bills her daughter-in-law had given her for her daily expenses. She counted out the bills—the program was costly—and handed them to her grandson.

  He ducked his head and shyly mumbled something in English.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  Ah Liam switched back to Chinese. “I said, ‘I’m very grateful for your help.’” He picked up his satchel and flashed an impish grin.

  He was so much happier now. Bee Kim wished there were an activity her daughter-in-law could throw herself into, something other than her work to rescue San San. Perhaps Seok Koon would consider it callous to suggest such a thing, but Bee Kim knew better. Why did they think she filled her hours with mahjong? Certainly not for the company of the other émigrés. She, too, had days when she missed her granddaughter so much, all she could do was lie in bed with her eyes squeezed shut, fervently praying that when she opened them she’d be back in the villa, a thin wall away from San San. Unlike the rest of them, however, Bee Kim lived in the real world, where things didn’t come true simply because you wished them to.

  Unbidden, her sister’s small face at age six rose in her mind. Full cheeks, flat nose, crooked smile. San San really did take after Bee Lian. Bee Kim felt her eyes mist over, and she forced down the memory before the tears formed. Reaching for her cane, she stood and went to the kitchen to check on dinner preparations.

  22

  A flash of blue caught San San’s attention. Tangled in a bush was the dusty tarp she’d hidden beneath just three weeks earlier in that handcart, her heart battering her chest as she held on to Auntie Rose. How trusting and naïve she’d been, brimming with such foolish certainty that everything would go according to plan.

  A rustling in the waist-high grasses drew her gaze over her shoulder for the umpteenth time since she’d fled the postmaster’s lawn; she was sure the servants had somehow tracked her all the way to this deserted cliff on the islet’s far edge. But when she lowered her eyes, she found the noise had been caused by a harmless reed snake, which, though by no means reassuring, was a more welcome sight than that of Cook’s heavy, panting form. She jumped out of the snake’s path and made for the edge of the cliff, searching the waters below for the rickety boat the students had lashed to a boulder.

  All that remained was a single oar, half buried in the sand, and what use was an oar with no boat?

  Across the narrow channel the Xiamen harbor beckoned, close enough to watch the tiny people working aboard a pair of graceful junks. Down below, the thin strip of beach was littered with rotting driftwood and fronds shaken loose from a row of coconut trees, none of which could be used to construct some kind of raft.

  A burst of wind carried a familiar tune, sung in a high reedy voice, across the water to San San. “Waves are crashing, they scare me not. Set my course straight, I row ahead.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she spied a wiry figure in a wide-brimmed straw hat dragging a boat ashore. When the figure removed his hat and mopped his brow with the edge of his shirt, she recognized the fisherman she and her brother had befriended the summer before, the one who’d taught them to harvest oysters. It amused her that he’d been singing a children’s song. She recalled his kind eyes that seemed to seal themselves shut when he threw back his head and laughed. But she dared not call out. Instead, she crouched behind a bush and watched him take his meager catch from the boat. He swiftly gutted and cleaned each fish and plopped it in a bucket of water. When he was done, he set the bucket beneath a coconut tree and lay down beside it. He covered his face with his hat, shifted this way and that, and went still. In the shallow waves his boat stood, ready to be nudged back to sea.

  San San scrambled down the steep rock face, clinging to the wild grasses for balance, careful not to make a sound. Near the base of the hill, a rock beneath her foot gave way, and she fell, scraping her elbow and knee. But she did not cry out, and the fisherman continued to doze.

  San San was close enough to touch the boat’s stern when she remembered something her mother had told her: some of the islet’s fishermen, she’d said, were too poor to own houses and slept in their boats at night. By stealing this boat, she would not only take his livelihood but also his home. She gazed back at the sleeping man, and thought of waking him and asking his permission. He was so friendly, so cheerful. Perhaps he would even offer to row her across. But what if he said no, as—now that she considered it—he surely would? What if he recognized her and turned her in, denounced her along with the entire town?

  She rolled up her pant legs, pushed the boat into the water with little difficulty, and jumped in. Then she plunged the oars into the sea and rowed with all her might. To her amazement, the clear silky water that she so often glided through was a thick, unforgiving sludge. These oars, so long, so unwieldy, battled her every stroke. Within minutes her shoulders and arms and back burned. She’d traveled only a few dozen meters when the longing to raise the oars into the boat and rest awhile colonized every inch of space in her mind.

  A voice screamed, “Hey! Come back here, you bastard, you son of a dog!”

  The fisherman sprinted across the sand, his face a red knot of fury. San San put her head down and dragged the oars through the sludge, over and over, as fast as she could. Blisters formed where her fingers met her palms. She feared her arms would soon give way. Over her shoulder she saw the fisherman splash into the water and continue his chase.

  Her throat was so parched she had to beat back the desire to pour a handful of ocean in her mouth. When the fire in her arms grew too excruciating to bear, she turned back to look once again, letting the oars drift in the water. What a stupid plan this was. If the fisherman didn’t catch her, someone else would—either here in the channel, or later in the city. She should give up now. Let the fisherman turn her in, collect his reward. If someone had to profit from her capture, at least it was him.

  She was ready to turn the boat around when Auntie Rose’s face filled her mind, the lifeless eyes, the brilliant red slash against her bleached skin, the dark cave of her mouth when she dropped her jaw and wailed. Adrenaline shot through San San’s limbs. Her blistered palms tightened around the oars and she pushed onward to Xiamen.

  Not far from shore, the fisherman’s head bobbed in the ocean. He continued to spew curses and obscenities, but he appeared to have stopped chasing her. Maybe he didn’t swim well enough; maybe she was moving faster than she’d thought. She told herself to row just three more strokes, and then another three, and then another. Finally she raised the oars and caught her breath, dipping her battered hands in the bath-warm water. A sumptuously cool breeze drifted over her. The current picked up, bearing her stolen boat toward the harbor. When she regained her strength, she kept rowing.

  How much time passed, she could not say. Ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? Her muscles quavered as she fought through the last few desperate strokes before leaping into the thigh-high water and dragging the boat onto the rocky sand. If not for the fishermen peering at her askance, she would have collapsed right on the shore beside her boat.

  The squat, concrete open-air harbor was steps away, so close the intoxicating waft from the food vendors swelled the hollow in her stomach. She adjusted the portfolio of letters tucked in the waistband of her pants and entered the main hall, treading lightly so her soaked shoes wouldn’t squeak against the floor, careful to avoid the path of a pair of patrolling policemen. Her nose led her to plump, white moa ji made from sweet glutinous rice flour and coated with ground peanuts, to dough sticks emitting a joyous, sizzling percussion in their bath of golden oil. Every once in a while, a well-dressed cadre would approach a vendor, jiggling coins in his palm. She watched a lanky woman with small round spectacles shove a red bean pancake in her mouth with an envy that bordered on hatred. When the woman took a swig of tea and then abandoned her tin cup on the ground, San San pounc
ed on it and gulped down the bitter dregs.

  Above the chattering passersby and the grunting laborers and the crash of machinery rose the rich, sinuous sounds of an erhu. A few notes in, the music took the shape of “The Crescent Moon Rises,” a simple, well-known folk tune San San had mastered on the piano years ago. A small audience had gathered at the opposite end of the hall. Slipping between people to get to the front, San San saw a thin boy, no taller than Ah Liam, clad in ragged clothing. The boy had a large, round head with ears that jutted out from beneath his floppy hair like the handles of a jug. As he weaved his bow between the twin strings of his slender instrument, his large head bobbed in time. San San thought he played quite well, but it was when the boy opened his mouth and sang that she grasped the extent of his talent. The boy’s unchanged voice was high and pure, yet tinged with shadow, like the first evening chill at the end of a sweltering late-summer day. A few food vendors abandoned their stands to join the audience, and though she considered seizing the opportunity to steal a morsel of food, the music held her in place.

  The boy sang three more folk songs, one after another without pause, finishing with the crowd-pleasing “Mo Li Hua.” Then he bowed theatrically to the warm applause. A vendor offered him a packet of rice, another, a small fish. The boy gathered up his spoils in a cloth bundle, strapped the erhu to his back, and strolled out of the hall, whistling a jaunty tune. San San envied his carefree attitude, his skill and charm, his soon-to-be-full stomach. She wondered if he played here every day and how much food he collected and why he didn’t have to go to school. When he turned down the footpath lining the water, she followed.

  The boy squatted beneath a shady tree, pulled a pair of wooden chopsticks from his shirt pocket, and proceeded to cram the fish into his cheeks, pausing only to spit out a few delicate bones. When he’d devoured precisely half the fish, he carefully wrapped up the remains and moved on to the rice.

  San San approached with caution. “Don’t you have school today?”