Dreams of the Red Phoenix

by Virginia Pye

  Thirteen

  Please, Mother, get in. Don’t make a scene.”

  “Humans are not meant to be beasts of burden. I hate to encourage it.”

  “It’s the man’s job.”

  “I’m fastest in town!” exclaimed the rickshaw driver.

  “Let’s go now,” Charles pleaded with her, “so the other drivers leave us alone.”

  She slid in beside him, and the rickshaw bolted forward, throwing them both against the straw seat. Though he wore no shoes, the coolie ran swiftly as he navigated the deeply rutted road that led away from the mission compound and into the town. When they were young, Charles and Han had raced barefoot on the hard-packed dirt to the river, and he knew how the pebbles cut into you.

  “We need to find him,” he said, more to himself than to his mother.

  She patted his knee briskly. “We will find your friend,” she said. “We will.”

  Her rising determination almost made Charles imagine she could see to it. Since opening the medical station in their home, she had been behaving as if she could accomplish whatever she set her mind to. He had to wonder if her confidence rose in inverse proportion to how hopeless their situation had become.

  On the narrow main street, only a few shops appeared open. Young women dressed in high-cut, tight-fitting cheongsam strutted in front and called out to any men passing by. From the doorsteps of deserted buildings, grandfathers in traditional robes smoked thin pipes and gestured with long pinkie nails coated in white powder. Stocky, unshaven Russians in Western-style black suits and fedoras even in the summer heat hissed prices at Charles and his mother as they hurried past.

  When the rickshaw reached the farmers’ market, they climbed out. The driver set down the bamboo poles and doubled over with hacking. When he finally stood straight again, Charles saw blood on his lips. His mother was about to pay, but Charles snatched the coins from her and slapped them down on the straw seat. The driver pocketed the change quickly and was gone in an instant.

  “That driver was not only sick,” his mother said, “but utterly lackluster and exhibiting very strange behaviors. All that twitching and the way his arms shook. Did you notice? I suspect he has several illnesses at once in addition to being malnourished.”

  Charles wondered how it was possible that his mother had lived in China for five years and still couldn’t tell an opium addict when she saw one. The rickshaw driver with his scabbed arms and rheumy, darting eyes looked like every man who ever stumbled out of a den after a binge. Charles had never been inside one of the smoky rooms down the back alleys but had peered in as he passed and seen the sickly-looking customers lolling about on couches, their heads thrown back onto threadbare pillows in some sort of unpleasant ecstasy. His mother had always said that she loved the Chinese people, their language and history, but as far as Charles could tell, she had rarely left the mission before now and certainly had never wound through the passageways and side lanes the way he had with Han. The Chinese people must have remained abstract to her—more the idea of a people than the real thing.

  But on this warm afternoon, she strode into what was left of the marketplace, a straw basket swinging on her arm, as if fully expecting to find the makings for supper. Charles did a quick two-step to keep up with her as she pressed on past the destroyed stalls, many of which had been converted into makeshift homes with laundry hanging across their fronts instead of awnings. Someone tossed a tub of bathwater onto the path, and his mother simply skirted it. She even kept her balance when a pack of wild dogs raced by and knocked against her legs. None of it seemed to bother her.

  When they reached the one open stall, his mother stepped up but didn’t seem to recognize Mrs. Chen, who looked even more bedraggled then the last time, her clothing torn and her hands scabbed and encrusted with dirt.

  “How much for these root vegetables?” his mother inquired in the local dialect. Charles was afraid she might touch a shrunken beet, but luckily she seemed to know that wasn’t done.

  Mrs. Chen continued to repair a filthy and tattered straw basket and barked an unreasonable price. Charles’s mother laughed outright, placed her hands on her hips, and exclaimed, “Why, that’s robbery! No one has that kind of money any longer. These vegetables shall rot before you find a willing customer.” She then glanced around at the peasants who rummaged through what was left of the market. “Good woman,” she said, “have you no feeling for your compatriots? You don’t need to sell your precious produce to me, but at least offer a better price to your comrades.”

  “She’s not going to budge,” Charles whispered. “Let’s go.”

  His mother rose taller, leaned over the stall, and said, “Your fellow citizens are starving, madam. If you have food, then it is only right that you share it. Your generosity will come back to you. Captain Hsu will see to it that you are given a portion of the millet we have at the mission.”

  The woman finally looked up. “Captain Hsu?” Beetle nut juice fell slowly and deliberately from her bottom lip onto the dusty ground. “That man is dog and traitor. The Reds are responsible for this.” She spread her bony arms. “If he and his sons of bitches, turtle-egg, festering dog-bitch men had not come here, the Japs would have left us alone.” She snarled quite a bit like a dog herself, Charles thought.

  “He is none of those things,” his mother persisted. “He fights for the country and its people. He’s against capitalist greed, which I can plainly see you remain in favor of.”

  “Mother,” Charles tugged at her arm, “please don’t get involved.”

  She turned suddenly to him and said in English, “But I am involved. I’m deeply involved, and you should be, too.”

  Then she turned back to Mrs. Chen and continued, “Captain Hsu and his compatriots think about the whole, not just those at the top. China is far too destitute a country to have the marketplace rule. I see that now. The Communists intend for the vast majority of your people to be literate and fed. Isn’t that marvelous? Other countries may have higher goals, but here that is what’s needed. But everyone must get on board. I think you should join them.”

  Mrs. Chen’s three-legged stool fell over as she stood abruptly and hobbled off. “American woman is Communist,” she muttered. “Now I have seen everything!”

  Charles finally pulled his mother away. “You can’t get tangled up in this. We have to leave.”

  “Yes, you’re right, it’s time we got back to the mission. Hopefully we’ll still come upon something for supper on the way.”

  “I don’t mean leave the market,” Charles said. “I mean leave the province, leave China. It isn’t safe here any longer. I want to go back to America.”

  His mother stared at him for a long moment, and her face did not soften, even when she should have noticed his eyes filling and his bottom lip quivering almost imperceptibly. He didn’t intend to cry, but the beginnings of tears were there, and she should have sensed them. When he was younger, his mother had always known when he was injured or sad or had gotten his feelings hurt by friends. She had called him sensitive—which he knew meant overly sensitive. But, while that was true, it was also true that she had been overly sensitive to him. Alert to his every pain, his mother had known how he felt almost before he did. But apparently not any longer.

  “I’m surprised you don’t understand that we are still needed here, Charles.”

  “All right, I wasn’t going to tell you this,” he said, pulling the Nationalist Army cap from his back pocket and using it to fan his face, “but it will change your mind. A Japanese soldier shot at me today.”

  His mother’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t throw her arms around him, as he had expected she might. She didn’t invite stares with her exclamations of fear for his life or gratitude for his safety.

  “I wonder,” she said after a long moment, “if we need weapons.”

  “Mother!”

  “Now, hear me out,” she continued. “Perhaps we would be wise to have more protection than we have.”
>
  He had assumed that once she heard of his narrow brush with death, they would start packing their bags. She would understand that the safe and idyllic mission compound of his childhood was now no different from the occupied town, and while things might have calmed down somewhat for the time being, the whole province was basically lawless and fraught with danger. In the hinterlands of Northwestern China, far from international scrutiny, the Japanese could do anything they liked. The wild bullet that had grazed his head had taught Charles that.

  But his mother carried on, “Every one of these Chinese boys has a mother. Some have died in my arms when they should have been home, helping in their family field. I feel we owe it to them and to their mothers to not just traipse off when the going gets tough. One can’t leave an army on a whim, Charles.”

  He looked down at his dusty sneakers and felt dizzy. He wanted to sink right there on the dirt path and let the stream of people continue around him. Perhaps she was braver than he. Perhaps he remained a coddled boy after all. He wished his father were here to sort it out.

  “Son,” his mother continued as she held on to his shoulders with two strong hands, “I’m afraid I have to ask, but where were you when this incident took place? Were you outside the mission? Were you wearing that cap?” She gestured to the Nationalist Army hat, which he hurriedly stuffed back into his pocket. “Charles, were you asking for trouble in some way?”

  “You think it’s my fault that I got shot at?”

  “Sometimes your judgment isn’t the best.”

  “You think I deserved it?” he shouted.

  “Of course not! But, perhaps it was just an instance of mistaken identity, or you weren’t as cautious as we need to be. If we stay within the compound and are protected by Captain Hsu and his men—”

  “Mother, Captain Hsu can’t protect us. The Geneva Convention can’t protect us from the Japs if they choose to attack.”

  “We don’t call them ‘Japs,’ Charles. We call them ‘Japanese.’ And Captain Hsu is not an inferior commander. He is very wise. You could learn something from him.”

  She loved it, he thought, the chaos all around. “I can’t listen to you. I have to go.” He turned and started to push through the crowds.

  “Charles, get back here!”

  But he kept on, weaving through the Chinese—each selling something, wanting something, when he wanted nothing except to leave.

  “Young man,” his mother gave one last shout, “come back here this instant!”

  Charles turned down an alley, and another, and finally a third, until there was no way her voice could still reach him. He hoped more than anything that he might come around a bend and bump into Han. Charles pressed on, following his Jack Purcells, which he had tried to keep clean instead of covered in ugly yellow silt because he thought that was how the boys back home in America wore them. The truth was, he didn’t know how the boys back home did anything. Life magazine arrived six months late, when it arrived at all. The last movie shown in the Parish Hall was over a year old. For all he knew, Jean Harlow had been replaced several times over by younger leading ladies.

  He came out of an alley onto a crowded road. People hurried past, intent on repairing their homes and shops, refilling tin buckets, carrying loads, scavenging or trading scraps of food. They knocked into him where he stopped, but he didn’t care. Charles kicked clods of torn-up dirt, soiling his sneakers even more. He would buy a new pair when he got out of here. Because, he made a promise to himself, he was going home to America, no matter what his mother said or did.

  “Hey, good-looking,” a skinny, sickly girl called to him from the door of a boarded-up shop. She wore a tight dress with slits to the tops of her thighs, her thin arms also exposed, unlike a proper Chinese woman. She beckoned him with long, red-tipped fingernails. “Come on over,” she purred. Smoke and the voices of men drifted out onto the street from inside, along with the rattle of dice and the percussive slap of mah-jongg tiles.

  “Thanks, anyway,” he said and added, “I’m an American.”

  The moment he said it, he realized it was irrelevant to her trade. She cackled, and he couldn’t blame her.

  “And I’m a beautiful flower. You want to pluck a beautiful flower?”

  An older woman in a flowing, large-sleeved gown appeared from the shadowed doorway and stepped into the harsh afternoon light. Elaborate decorations floated from a bun high on her head. Her face was painted white like the actors in Chinese opera Charles had seen in the provincial capital. Black lines representing eyebrows curved upward in a maniacal way as the grande dame towered over the sickly girl, who shrank beside her.

  “Back inside to customers!”

  “But I found this delicacy,” the girl said as she tossed another beckoning glance at Charles.

  The madam looked him up and down and hissed, “He is not for you. Now, go!” She swatted the girl’s backside in the tight dress.

  Charles knew he should move but remained stuck in the same spot, transfixed by the elaborate costume and makeup. The madam was far too tall to be a Chinese woman, he thought, and only later considered whether she might not have been a woman at all. Beads of sweat stood out on her painted forehead, and the whiskers on her chin had been powered white as well, like one of the characters in Lian’s terrifying bedtime tales.

  “You America?” the madam asked as she stepped closer.

  He nodded.

  “Get lost, America! You don’t belong here.”

  Her sudden rudeness woke him from his spell. “All right, I’m going,” he said, but still he didn’t budge.

  “What is it now, boy?” she asked, changing her tone. “You want to come inside? Don’t just look. Touch. But first,” she held out a hand with the long pinkie nail, “give all your coins to me!”

  Charles remained transfixed by her unnatural appearance and voice. The words seeped out of her in a high singsong that grated on the ear but was also strangely enticing. She gave him the creeps, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “No, you see,” he began, “I just wanted to say that we’re not the enemy. We’re on your side. Look,” he pulled out the Chinese Nationalist cap and placed it on his head. “I even have this.”

  She careened down off the wooden steps in her silk skippers and scurried toward him. With a high-pitched cry, she lifted her arm in the elaborate robe, waved a folded fan in his face, and used it to knock the cap off his head. “Take that off!” she shouted. “Only our soldiers wear that!”

  Charles snatched the cap from the dusty ground.

  “Go back to Christian church and pray for us.” She swatted his shoulders with the fan. “Go, America! Go home and pray!”

  Charles jumped away from the crazy woman, turned, and hurried off. When he reached the mission compound, he couldn’t bring himself to go in through the open gate but instead scrambled up the stone steps to the top of the wall. He needed to see the countryside. The madam was right, he thought. He and his mother and the other missionaries should go back to America and pray, though he knew his days of praying were over. He’d never kneel again, or whisper into the folds of his hands before bed. Even his father’s advice seemed wrong now. He didn’t need to care for his mother. She was stronger than he was and had a will of her own. What he needed to do was take care of himself and get the hell out of there.

  The cooing of the birds reached Charles as he reached the top. At least he was keeping his promise to them. Dusk meant feeding time. But when he turned the corner, he saw that the cage was already open. The birds fluttered about as their seeds were scattered before them on the brick walkway.

  “Han!” Charles shouted as he ran toward his old friend and hugged him. “Dear Lord,” he said, “you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  Han nodded enthusiastically, his face bright and open.

  “Where on earth have you been?” Charles asked.

  Han smiled and nodded, though more shyly. “I’m with the Eighth Route Army,” Han said. “The best ar
my in all of China. We have tens of thousands of recruits now!”

  Charles stood back and looked his friend up and down. Han stood straighter and seemed taller. He wore a pale blue jacket and matching pants, thin cloth shoes—a real uniform, including a belt that cinched his narrow waist with a buckle bearing the Communist star. He even had on a Red Army cap.

  “You look good,” Charles said.

  “We don’t have much food, but we manage. And all the soldiers take lessons in reading and writing. I help teach them. It’s good, Charles. The country is changing. For the first time, the people are in charge. No more warlords and, no offense, no more greedy foreign influences. Not you, but, well, you know—”

  Charles didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to ask Han to explain it to him now.

  “Because of my experience here in the mission,” Han continued, “I will serve as a translator for our top leaders. Some are the sons of peasants and laborers, but very smart men. I’ve never known such intelligent men, and brave, too.”

  Charles had never heard Han speak for so long or so eloquently about anything before.

  “But how are you?” Han asked. “I see our birds are plump. You have done a good job caring for them.”

  “Not really,” Charles said.

  “It is good to see you.” Han reached up and clapped Charles on the shoulder. “But,” Han said, stepping back, “where did you get that Nationalist Army cap?”

  Charles pulled it off and tossed it onto the bricks as if it was on fire. “I found it by the side of the road. I don’t mean anything by wearing it. I’m not in favor of them. I don’t really know who I’m in favor of, except you, of course. If you want me to burn it, I will. We could burn it together!”

  Han laughed. “You are so dramatic, my friend. No need to burn it. Just don’t wear it. It’s not safe. And also not right.”

  “Of course, absolutely.”

  “Would you like my Red Army cap instead?” Han asked.

  Charles could hardly believe it. “That’s too generous.”

  “I shouldn’t wear my uniform in town, anyway, even with only a few Japs around. I would be honored for you to have it.”