No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  Late that night, dressed as males, the two women climbed into a taxi.

  “To the train station,” Agnes commanded. But when the taxi slowed behind rickshaws choking the narrow street, Ding Ling touched the driver’s shoulder.

  “Turn back.”

  “No,” Agnes said in Chinese. “Continue to the station.”

  “I cannot go in two directions at once.”

  Ding Ling grabbed Agnes’ hand. “I can’t leave! My work is here! My friends are here! I can’t run like a frightened woman!”

  Agnes jerked her hand from Ding Ling’s. “This is no time for heroics,” she snapped. Ding Ling’s eyes watered. Agnes softened her tone. “I promise to join you,” she said, as if a promise could be relied on or delivered in China in late 1931.

  25

  Shanghai 1931

  Agnes stared up at telephone lines looping over roofs, dropping to the street, swaying in the winter wind like filaments of a destroyed spider’s web. The smell of burning buildings and food, burning humans and rats, hung over Shanghai. She picked her way through jagged pieces of concrete that were once the street. A dead man lay bloated behind a wheelbarrow, propped unnaturally between a wheel and a stone wall. He sat naked, his chest slashed open. Someone had told her of seeing Japanese soldiers cut out a man’s heart; how it had steamed in the January air.

  Three Japanese soldiers sauntered out of an alley carrying scarves full of jewelry. The scarves were tied into silk bundles and looped through their fingers. The shortest of the three stopped and kicked out a window as casually as if he were greeting an acquaintance. Agnes kept a distance. Her western appearance, her press pass pinned to her coat like a corsage, had so far warded off attack.

  She had not remained in the safe European concessions. With her notebook and pencil, she walked and ran with Chinese families as they evacuated, lane by lane, just ahead of the Japanese. In the background, bombs, gunfire, and sirens shook the city. Wearing slacks and an army cap, Agnes had stayed close to the Nationalist Nineteenth Route Army, dropping back a street when fighting erupted, catching up when the soldiers moved ahead. Nearly trapped once in gunfire, she ran into an apartment building that seemed deserted. Only after she’d crouched on the stairs for long, silent minutes did the building give up its secret: the rooms were full of people. A baby’s muffled cry drifted down from an upper floor. Someone with a light step moved now and then above her head.

  A short distance down the lane, Japanese machine guns erupted. Another alley full of Chinese soldiers and civilians was being cleaned out.

  As she’d known all along, Japan, not internal dissension, was China’s real enemy. For a short time she’d helped Ozaki Hotsumi and Richard Sorge inform Russian and Chinese contacts of Japanese activities. Now, as she passed the bodies of two dead Chinese children holding each other, the depth of her hatred for Japan nearly paralyzed her. When Lu Xun’s neighborhood was bombed, she forgot about being a war correspondent and put aside her notebook. By rickshaw and foot she tried to reach his house, but the Japanese had sealed off the area. She located a friend who owned a car and military pass. When he picked her up in the French Concession, she climbed into the back seat. It looked official that way.

  As they passed Japanese troops lining the streets of the Chapei district, the friend looked at her in the rear view mirror. “You’re not taking notes?” he said. “You’ll remember all this?”

  Agnes only nodded. Her face in the mirror was still and white.

  In front of Lu Xun’s house, Agnes opened the car door and walked with a business-like gait to the front entrance. The roofless building next door still smoldered, three walls guarding the gutted core. In a vacant lot, Japanese military trucks sat parked while the drivers made tea over a fire.

  Agnes banged on the front door, then each ground-floor window, but there was no answer. The back door, too, was locked, curtains drawn.

  Two soldiers stepped around the corner of the house. One of them spoke to Agnes in Japanese, a short sentence that, itself, sounded like gunfire. Agnes pointed to her press pass and, walking around them, returned to the car. Poised, even detached, she got into the back seat behind the driver. Only when they turned the corner did she begin to weep.

  “Is Lu Xun your lover?” the friend asked.

  “No. No. Much more than that. He is—a father. A father for China.” The statement consoled her. It would be days before she learned that Lu Xun and his family were safe with friends.

  Even when the attack subsided and Chinese troops formed a defensive perimeter around the city, Agnes still had to watch carefully each time she stepped out of the European concessions and into Chinese City. She was not safe with either the Japanese or Chinese. The Shanghai police, attempting to carry out instructions of the British Secret Service, had wanted to arrest her on some pretext or other ever since she arrived in the city. Now they wanted her for hiding Communists in her apartment. Worst of all—worse, even, than the nagging worries about Ding Ling and Lu Xun—was the break that occurred between herself and Madame Sun Yat-sen.

  Madame did not speak of it directly. Agnes heard nothing of it from Ding Ling, nor from Lu Xun. It was Mao Dun, gentle, conciliatory Mao Dun, the novelist, who haltingly conveyed the specifics when Agnes asked if he knew why Madame no longer wished to see her.

  “It is a question of cultures,” he said in Chinese, slowly, so Agnes could understand. “It is East and West.”

  “What do you mean, ‘It is East and West’?”

  “You are an internationalist,” he temporized. “We Chinese are still isolated. Provincial.”

  “Why has Song Qingling never accepted me?”

  “It is your incisiveness,” he said. “Your thorough lack of feudalistic—”

  “It is you saying these things, not Madame!” she snapped.

  Mao Dun took a deep breath. “It is frankness,” he said. “Chinese are not so frank as Americans.”

  “Frank!” Agnes said the word in English. “Madame should see me when I am frank!”

  “I will be frank,” he said. He cleared his throat. “It is money.”

  “Money? What do you mean, ‘money’?”

  Mao Dun looked off into space, as if he wished he had begun another way. “The money that she gave you for The Voice of China journal has been spent.”

  “That money was used for a good cause! That money supported Communists from Jianxi who hid in my apartment! And I have paid the editor of the journal! Never have I taken a yuan for myself!”

  “You are not accused of stealing.”

  “The hell I’m not!” Agnes said in English.

  “Madame is careful about money,” Mao Dun said gently. He tried humor. “Politically liberal, financially conservative.”

  But Agnes did not smile. Tears threatened to overcome fury; then fury overcame tears. In the end the two canceled each other out. With a last prolonged look at Mao Dun, she walked off, already in the grip of a stony depression. Even in China, even in the heart of the Revolution, she could find no acceptance. It felt as if she had been rejected by a mother. Rejected by earth itself. A daughter of earth found wanting.

  Money! She’d never been good with money. When a need came along, not for herself but for revolutionary friends who slipped in and slipped out of Shanghai, she offered it. Madame Sun Yat-sen with her orderly columns of figures didn’t understand the risks revolutionaries take just living through an ordinary day.

  It was her own fault. She’d put Madame, like Lu Xun, like Chatto, like the Lion of the Punjab so long ago, not on a pedestal, but worse than that: in the center of her heart. And Madame did not wish to be there. In spite of her hard work and the risks she took, she was an outsider. She was not Chinese and never would be.

  26

  China 1937

  Agnes pumped the bellows and picked out “Streets of Laredo” on the small harmonium that had been transported by a Red Army truck over the mountains from Xi’an to Yan’an. From there, soldiers had carried it up
the narrow, winding terrace of Army headquarters, past Zhu De’s and Mao Zedong’s hillside caves, on up to Agnes’ cave one level above.

  The bellows wheezed and the song ended.

  “Play ‘My Beloved,’” Zhu De said in Chinese. The end of daylight hovered outside the wooden door that had been fitted into an archway cut out of the hill. Inside, white-washed walls held onto the dying light. The Commander pulled a small, dog-eared song book wrapped in a piece of red cloth from his tunic pocket and turned several pages.

  “’My Beloved,’” he repeated, and held the stitched sheets apart with one rough hand while Agnes leaned forward and squinted in the faint light. She hit a flawed chord and stumbled over the melody. Zhu De, after waiting a courteous period of time, began to sing, ignoring the harmonium.

  “My beloved! I say farewell before our bed

  And tell you not to love me.

  We must travel the revolutionary road.”

  His voice was strong. He sang the song three times without accompaniment. Agnes thought the lament was for his wife, Wu Yu-lan, captured by the Kuomintang and murdered, her head mounted on the main street in the town of her birth.

  The cave grew dark. Agnes covered the harmonium with a cloth to keep off the gritty dust, and led the way onto the terrace. Zhu De brought out two chairs, a sign that he wanted to talk. Agnes opened her notebook.

  “Sun Yat-sen died in 1925,” he began. “After that, nothing was the same.” Agnes’ pencil made a scratching sound on the thin paper.

  “Chiang Kai-shek began to accept loans from Chinese and foreign bankers. In 1927 he found it necessary to please them by crushing the Shanghai Communist workers’ coup.”

  Though the moon was not high enough to be reflected in the Yan River flowing slowly by the foot of the terraced hillside, it illuminated Zhu De’s deep-set eyes and broad nose.

  “The Chinese workers and peasants are the most revolutionary people on earth,” he declared impulsively, extending one arm in a sweeping gesture toward the dark mountains that surrounded them. “All they need is good leadership, a sound program, and arms.”

  He pointed his finger at her. “Write this in your notebook: we choose our own battlefield and keep the mountains to our back. We draw the enemy where we want him, then cut off his transport columns, attack his flanks, surround and destroy him. We hold ‘Speak Bitterness Meetings’ with captured troops. We explain why they are poor and hungry, unpaid by the government that hires them. We invite them to join our cause. We offer freedom and military passes if they wish to leave.”

  “How many leave?”

  “Few.”

  A dog barked from another hillside. Light from two cigarettes came and went on the river bank below.

  “An old bandit of Chingkanshan taught me much about strategy,” Zhu De said. “‘You don’t have to know how to fight,’ he told me. ‘All you have to know is how to encircle the enemy.’”

  Agnes laughed.

  “The Kuomintang,” Zhu De continued, “learned tactics from the Japanese. Single column, front and flank guards. On the other hand, we Communists split up into small, swift combat units and cut the enemy into segments. The peasants in the villages capture transport for us, spy, destroy small enemy units and stragglers. The Kuomintang is afraid to advance if they sight even one barefoot peasant watching from a distance.”

  “I have heard that you are called ‘treacherous bandit chief,’” Agnes said. Zhu De did not answer. “There is a song about you,” Agnes pursued. “The words tell that you carry rice to the top of a mountain, barefoot, without ever growing tired.”

  “That is not true,” Zhu De said with an impatient, self-deprecating gesture of the hand. “I never go barefoot. I always wear straw sandals.”

  27

  Xi’an 1936

  Agnes awoke in the soft-seat accommodation of the train to Xi’an with a bad taste in her mouth. It was two years since a short visit to America, yet she came out of sleep with precise thoughts, fresh as yesterday, of her sister whom she’d visited in San Diego; of editors in New York; of various self-satisfied, amiable, ignorant, and fatuous Americans who had asked her questions, then listened suspiciously while she talked about the Russian Revolution and the coming revolution in China. Capitalism was dead, she informed them. But with joblessness and depression all about, they still screwed up their faces and disbelieved her.

  She sat up and dampened her washcloth in the warm water brought to the compartment by a porter. Outside, mist rose from rice fields and hung, motionless and mysterious, in gray daybreak. Neither the man in the berth above her nor the two passengers on the opposite side of her compartment had stirred. She wiped her face and looked out the window at China, its crops, haystacks, grave mounds crowned with clay pots standing randomly in-between fields. Silhouetted against the sun breaking above the horizon, a barefoot man and woman, water carriers, balanced a bamboo pole between them.

  Agnes got up to use the toilet at one end of the car. The fecal smell was heavy. In one part of her mind she recognized that she did not object to it, and that any American would. She squatted. Through the hole in the floor she watched the ground between tracks rush by.

  The car next to hers was hard-seat. If it were not for her contact, Diu Ling, and the Chinese Communists paying for her trip to the Northwest, she would be sitting in one of those same hard seats that were nailed to the siding. The car full of peasants looked cheerful with a clothesline of brightly colored washcloths strung along its length. But with so many people crowded together, it would be impossible to write and meet her deadline.

  Any American would expect a soft-seat as his due. Agnes did not. But then, Agnes no longer felt like an American. To the extent it taught her she no longer belonged in America, the trip home—no longer a home—had been instructive. An instructive mistake.

  She could not find a newspaper job; the Depression was in full swing. Further, her sister, Myrtle, an elementary school principal by now, disliked her and wanted nothing to do with her politics. Myrtle, whom she had put through college, didn’t want anyone to know they were sisters. She’d cringed when Agnes was written up in the San Diego newspaper. The right side of her face went into spasm, nervous paralysis, the doctor said, brought on by anxiety. Agnes understood that Myrtle’s respected position in the community could be threatened by a sister’s radical opinions. Even the liberal intellectuals in New York who should have understood what was happening in China were offended by the truths she brought back. They couldn’t believe conditions among the poor were as bad as Agnes said they were. They couldn’t believe Chiang Kai-shek was fighting the Communists instead of fighting Japan.

  Her rich little friend from New York days, Florence, didn’t understand the changes taking place in Europe, much less China. Agnes tried not to think about the money Florence had given her when she so desperately needed funds; Florence had saved her life, and now Agnes couldn’t bear her.

  She knew the intensity of her beliefs dazzled her friends and the small audiences she addressed. But though dazzled, electrified, they would not go the distance on behalf of the Chinese Communists who, almost alone, were fighting Japan. Her friends grew suspicious of her and she grew contemptuous of them. Her news was not entertaining; her radicalism was not easy.

  She returned to her compartment. The woman across the aisle was sitting up in the lower berth, drinking tea from a glass jar. Through most of the night she had cracked pumpkin seeds between her long front teeth, and the shells lay all about the floor.

  The landscape grew less and less flat as they left the coast behind. Hills changed to foothills, foothills to low mountains. The sun rose higher. Mentally she said good-bye to Shanghai and thought once more of her friend Ding Ling, kidnapped and murdered two years earlier. Silly girl. She should have left for the Northwest, not waited in Shanghai until it was too late. Agnes wiped away her tears with the washcloth. She made herself tea and opened the letter kept folded in an inside pocket of her trousers. It contained the add
ress where she was to meet her contact this afternoon.

  Diu Ling was waiting for her at the Forest of Steles, the museum of stone tablets located just inside the old Xi’an city wall. The upright monuments, taller than a person, with raised characters and illustrations, had been moved here in the eleventh century, by which time they were already ancient.

  How different this part of China was from the coast! Here, Westerners were seldom seen. Most Northwest Chinese had never been to Shanghai or a treaty port. Perhaps no one in Xi’an had ever seen a Western woman pull up to the entrance of the museum in a taxi. Agnes hurried into the courtyard. Diu Ling, slim and high-strung, stood by the statue of the Emperor’s favorite horse.

  He did not greet her but turned and entered the high-ceilinged room of the first of several pagodas. Agnes followed between rows of stone steles. On through two more courtyards and more pagodas with elaborate eave tiles and red lacquered supporting posts, on through additional high-ceilinged rooms until she neared an unidentifiable sound: a fast thumping, like a hundred slaps to a hundred mounds of bread dough There was a sweet odor. Not jasmine, not perfume, but a gummy smell that began to cloy. When she’d plunged deep into the stone forest, Diu Ling suddenly stepped out from behind a tablet and motioned for her to follow him to a corner of the pagoda where he could see anyone who approached.

  “You look well,” he said in Chinese. She had last seen him in Shanghai when he was en route from the Communist soviet in Southern China to Xi’an and she’d hidden him in her apartment. “Your trip was comfortable?”

  “Very comfortable. Soft-seat. Thank you.”

  “Please go to the compound of the German dentist, Dr. Wunsch,” Diu Ling said. Agnes memorized the address. Still on the lookout for informers, he brought his eyes back to Agnes’ face. “You will find old friends there. I, myself, will join you this evening.”

  “And Yan’an?” Agnes was eager to visit the Red Army base a day’s drive over the mountains north of Xi’an.