No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  Agnes bowed her head in the sorrow of a great man’s death. Yet the loss was so personal she felt physically bruised.

  Dr. Wunsch gained control over himself and pulled out another of what seemed an endless supply of white handkerchiefs. “My dear, let me buy you tea.” They stood and carefully descended the terraces and flights of stairs, as many-leveled as the consciousness of Lu Xun.

  Tuberculosis. How could such a common disease exist in a man devoid of commonness?

  They reached the teahouse nestled against the dragon wall.

  “I had trouble getting here,” Dr. Wunsch said as they seated themselves. The waitress set a basket of small meat dumplings and a teapot and cups on the turn-table tray in the center. Dr. Wunsch rotated the wheel so that Agnes could serve herself.

  “Did you come by Army truck?”

  “Yes, but the blockade has tightened. Everyone is being questioned. Chiang Kai-shek’s train arrives soon in Xi’an.”

  Agnes paused, her chopsticks poised a few inches above the dumpling.

  “Even Chiang Kai-shek cannot help but notice,” Dr. Wunsch continued, “the profound grief that all of China feels for Lu Xun.”

  Agnes picked up the dumpling with her chopsticks and bit into it. Hot grease ran over her hand and down her wrist.

  “Lu Xun compared China to a nation of cannibals devouring each other.” She pointed to the dumpling. “Now I compare him to the food we eat, nourishment for the body of China.” She sounded insincere to herself. A poor attempt to dignify death.

  “You will be asked to leave soon,” Dr. Wunsch remarked. He ladled soup into a small bowl. “Chiang Kai-shek will be staying here in Lington.”

  Agnes gave the tray a turn.

  “You must come back with me and stay in Xi’an until you are transported to Yan’an.”

  Security measures were strict between Lington and Xi’an. After the ride in Dr. Wunsch’s automobile through roads glutted with refugees being evacuated from their villages along the route Chiang Kai-shek was to take, Agnes asked the dentist to drop her off at the Xi’an Guest House. As she was signing the register, she overheard several men in Nationalist uniform.

  “Now that we’re here,” bragged a middle-aged officer with acne scars and a florid face, “we’ll straighten them out. They’re spoiled kids.”

  Early the next morning, after photographing protest marches from the side of the unpaved road, Agnes was sitting in a tearoom writing shorthand notes when shots rang out. Buoyed by Chiang’s presence in the Northwest, the local Xi’an police had fired into the Communist demonstration and killed nine protesters. So quickly did the owner of the tearoom slam shut his door that Agnes barely got out of the little building before being locked inside.

  In the middle of the street lay the body of a student, the face unrecognizable as a face; its brains moistened the dirt. Nearly fainting, Agnes fumbled with her small box camera. In the lens she saw her brother—it might have been John crushed to death in a ditch in Oklahoma. She could not take the picture.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. Pacing about her room, she heard shouts outside the Guest House. Her first act was to turn off the ceiling light, but the string snapped in her hand. She climbed up on the bed and unscrewed the single bulb. In the sudden darkness, hectic flashlight beams played across her window. She climbed off the bed and heard a great blow. Downstairs, the thick front door of the hotel splintered and fell. From the middle of the room she tried to separate the sound of running footsteps from her own pounding heart.

  “Come out, Japanese!” someone shouted. It was a ludicrous command from a soldier who didn’t know what army he was fighting. The footsteps drew closer, past the manager’s apartment, on toward her own door, where they stopped abruptly.

  “Japanese!”

  “I’m not Japanese! I’m an American!” Agnes shouted.

  Men in gray uniform broke her door down and rushed in. The leader shoved his rifle butt into her stomach and pushed her against the wall. When they saw her purse, camera, eyeglasses, fountain pen, they lost interest in her nationality. The man withdrew his rifle. Gingerly she touched her bruised abdomen.

  “Who are you?” she asked. For an answer he tore the wristwatch from her arm. The others pawed through her belongings until, loaded down with loot, they swaggered out of the room, bedding draped around their shoulders. Shots, shouts, running footsteps sounded in the hotel and in the streets outside. Agnes thought of a phrase: the roar of soldiers gone amok. She went to the manager’s apartment next door and called to him in a low, urgent voice. He crawled out from under his bed and followed her back to her room where he nailed a piece of blank paper to the broken door. With a flourish he wrote: “Anyone who enters this room will be shot.”

  Agnes laughed out loud. “It will probably be me.” She sat down on the edge of a straight chair, intending to rest for only a moment. But when she looked up it was daylight and she was listening to Dr. Wunsch’s German-accented Chinese: “Let me in! I have an appointment!” Dr. Wunsch had come to see if she was all right. She moved to the window to be closer to him.

  “An appointment!” he shouted. His tone was angry. After all, he was the Young Marshal’s dentist! Agnes heard a brief, intense argument.

  The single gunshot was like the crack of a whip. She ran out of her room, down the hall, and to the front entrance. There on the sidewalk, his legs twisted under him, lay Dr. Wunsch. She made no sound, but walked slowly toward him. The dozen soldiers standing in a knot eyed her as she knelt and felt for a pulse. Held in the soldiers’ hostile gaze, she stood. The air smelled sulfurous. Gunfire popped in random bursts throughout town. She walked away from the hotel, toward the headquarters of the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang. Someone there must help her bury Dr. Wunsch.

  With Diu Ling, Agnes pieced together the pre-dawn events of December 12th, 1936 that had instigated the warfare. The infuriated Young Marshall and Warlord Zhang Xueliang had demanded immediate release of the captured Communist demonstrators, to which Chiang Kai-shek responded by issuing an ultimatum to both of his warlord generals: attack the Communists or lose your command. But the warlords surprised everyone and kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek instead.

  Diu Ling paced back and forth in front of the shattered mirror that still hung in Agnes’ room. “The Young Marshall kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek in the middle of the night!” He grinned. “In his nightshirt! They found him in a cave behind a temple in Lington.”

  “Where did they take him?”

  “They brought him here to Xi’an and have put a guard at the door of an unknown location.”

  “The troops who looted the hotel—”

  “Belonged to Warlord Yang Hucheng,” said Diu Ling. “They were looking for Nationalists.”

  Agnes massaged her forehead with the fingertips of both hands. The armies were confused, and no one knew who the enemy was. Agnes knew the real enemy was not here. The real enemy was Japan.

  “When can I go to Yan’an?” she asked. Yan’an was now the headquarters of the raggle-taggle Red Chinese Army.

  “Soon. Yesterday I flew Zhou Enlai into Xi’an. The conference with Chiang Kai-shek will continue until he agrees to fight with us against Japan.” He stopped pacing and faced Agnes. “Zhou Enlai wishes to speak to you. The Kuomintang has erected a blockade around us, and we want you to begin broadcasting over Zhang Xueliang’s transmitter. It will be picked up in Shanghai and sent to the West.”

  Within days Agnes was broadcasting forty-minute news bulletins and interviews to Shanghai from the warlord’s headquarters, the only daily news of the Xi’an Incident to reach the outside world.

  Agnes met her first Communist foot soldiers, not in Yan’an as she’d expected, but in Xi’an, in jail. They were political prisoners captured months earlier in skirmishes with warlord and Nationalist troops. Now that they had been granted freedom, many were too ill to leave prison. The Baptist hospital gave her bandages, the hotel manager gave her small bottles of cognac, and she bought iodine and
alcohol with money the looters had not found. The young Red soldiers watched her without expression as she moved about the cells performing first-aid. Sometimes in the evening before she returned to her room for strong coffee brewed on a hot plate, they sang softly from the straw pallets where they lay:

  The crescent moon casts a long shadow.

  The pine trees mourn their mournful sigh.

  The autumn winds cry to the sky.

  The war spreads far, the nights grow dark.

  Our hearts bow down in loneliness.

  The very seas sigh wistfully.

  The doves plane homeward to their nests.

  The grasses bow down into the dust,

  Weary with sorrow, seeking rest.

  “I admire your courage,” Agnes said to a young soldier when the song ended.

  He nodded. “I like the army.”

  “Why do you like the army?”

  “I like it because I learn many things.”

  “Tell me exactly—one, two three, four, five—what have you learned that you did not know before?”

  “We learn more than five things. We go to school.”

  “What do you learn?”

  “We learn about the world.”

  “What shape is the world—flat, round, square—?”

  “Well, around here it’s both flat and has mountains.”

  “But the whole world?”

  The soldier’s dark eyes never left Agnes’ face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been in the army very long.”

  28

  Yan’an 1937

  In January Agnes sneaked through the military blockade around Xi’an and caught a ride to Yan’an in a Red Army truck. From the canopied truck bed she stared backwards at the narrow road unwinding behind her, a reddish-brown ledge clinging to the mountainside. The vast, lonely landscape of Shaanxi Province reminded her of peaks and plateaus of New Mexico and dry brush and roiling creeks of Arizona. She was at home in the mountains and red dirt; in the poverty and hope of the place. Though it looked barren, this soil was generative. Agnes understood it and mixed with it, for after all, she was as she had written, daughter of earth.

  The truck had to stop for peasants herding scrawny goats. Chickens squawked, teetered, and tacked just ahead of the wheels. Trees with angled trunks looked jointed, as if they were giant, bizarre, walking vegetables. An enormous hairy pig, built low to the ground and with a head the size of a vat, slung himself along the side of the road.

  They stopped in villages to organize the peasants into Communist soviets and anti-Japanese associations. They slept in deserted buildings and ate outdoors.

  “We will be in Yan’an by sunset,” Diu Ling said over ten o’clock breakfast, fringes of egg white cooked in a sweet broth. The soup steamed in the winter air.

  Agnes pointed with her chopsticks to the numerous caves that hived the mountainside. “Are they natural?”

  “They were dug centuries ago to store grain and to live in.” Diu Ling smiled his quick, intense smile. “You will see the inside of a cave soon enough.”

  Agnes lit a cigarette and sat back to study the woman who served them breakfast. The Northwest Chinese, with their ruddy cheeks and large eyes, reminded her of American Indians or pictures she’d seen of Eskimos. This woman, Agnes’ own age, cooked in a lean-to attached to a deserted mission church where the Red Army workers slept. Already she had a mouthful of bad teeth and her face was as ravaged as the landscape. She carried bowls of soup, baskets of steamed bread, back and forth, serving without question.

  “Come sit with us and eat,” Agnes said in Chinese. The woman looked shocked, then embarrassed for the foreigner with bad manners. Diu Ling, too, looked embarrassed. Agnes fixed him with her gaze.

  “What about the Communist principle of equality for women?”

  “At the present time fighting Japan is more important than equality of women.” Diu Ling tipped the bowl until only his black eyebrows showed above the rim, hiding, Agnes suspected, a contempt for women. He finished off the broth. “Tonight you will see equal women.” He set down the bowl, wiped his mouth, and left the table.

  “Lily Wu is an actress from Beijing,” Ding Ling said to Agnes when the Red Army truck rolled into camp. She had preceded Agnes to Yan’an, and was, presumably, one of the “equal women” Diu had grudgingly referred to. “You’re in time to see the play.”

  Agnes left her portable typewriter in the truck and followed Ding Ling toward the river. A cleared area had been given over to the Anti-Japanese Resistance Theatre. The large audience sat in a circle around a bare dirt stage. Below flowed the Yan, at this time of year a narrow ribbon of water. Red light from the dying sun touched the young soldiers seated on the ground and turned their caps and padded jackets pink. The mountains were enormous velvet shadows that stanched the bleeding sky, held off the Japanese, averted the hemorrhaging of China for a while longer.

  On stage a character in a long Mandarin robe spoke to a soldier wearing the Red Army uniform.

  “I cannot attend your people’s meeting because I am busy.” The Mandarin adjusted his false beard.

  “Why cannot you attend the people’s meeting?” the soldier asked in a stilted, sing-song voice.

  “I cannot attend the people’s meeting because I have to trim my beard.” The audience laughed.

  “If you trim your beard quickly, you will be able to come to the people’s meeting.”

  The Mandarin paused in stagy thought. “My daughter trims my beard and she is not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At the people’s meeting.” There was a roar of laughter. Agnes looked about the open-air theatre to see if she could recognize any of the Red Army leaders. She expected them to be in special seats set apart from the rest of the audience.

  “Is Mao Zedong here tonight?” she whispered to Ding Ling.

  “There.” Ding Ling indicated one of the middle rows. Agnes saw him next to Zhu De. Both sat among the ordinary soldiers, no difference in seating, no difference in uniform. They concentrated on the play, like the others, as charmed as children.

  “Here is the actress Lily Wu,” Ding Ling whispered as the Mandarin’s daughter approached the old man on stage.

  “Father,” Lily said in a sweet, clear voice that reached the last rows, “I have come to trim your beard.” In one hand she carried a pair of scissors. She opened them wide and extended them toward her father’s face. The audience did not laugh. The Mandarin backed away.

  “Bring me a chair,” he said. “I do not like to stand while my beard is being trimmed.”

  “Here is a chair, Father.” Lily Wu moved to one side of the dirt stage and picked up a straight chair. She walked with lithe grace, and her long black hair swayed like silk.

  “Tonight I will introduce you,” Ding Ling whispered. “Your cave is next to hers.”

  Your cave. Agnes flushed.

  “This is the last scene,” Ding Ling murmured.

  “How do you know?”

  “I wrote it.”

  Agnes turned to Ding Ling in surprise. The writing was primitive.

  “I write plays for a purpose,” Ding Ling whispered. “The needs of China are more important than style.”

  Lily Wu placed the chair behind the old Mandarin, but he refused to sit.

  “You do not wish to sit, Father?”

  “I have changed my mind. I do not wish to sit.”

  “Why do you not wish to sit?”

  “I do not wish to sit because I am displeased with you.” The audience leaned forward.

  Lily Wu lowered the scissors. “How have I displeased you?”

  “By attending the people’s meeting and by mingling with Communists.”

  “At the people’s meeting we learn that all classes must unite against Japan.”

  The old Mandarin lifted the chair a few inches off the ground and set it down hard. “Daughter, I forbid you to attend the people’s meeting.”

  The audience sat tense
and still, waiting for Lily’s response. She stood immobile, arrested in a painful choice between love for old and new China. Still holding onto the scissors, she finally walked, crying, away from her father and off the stage. The audience of young soldiers, Agnes could tell, was deeply affected. Tears ran down Ding Ling’s cheeks. Grief was palpable. Disruption between child and parent was a crisis in Chinese families. Agnes, who had spent most of her life rebelling, was struck again by the deep sense of obedience Chinese felt for their elders. In Agnes herself the play evoked a remnant of feudalistic feeling she usually denied: the impulse to please one’s parents and to obey, even when disobedience becomes necessary.

  The Mandarin gave a speech in which he brought into clear relief what China was giving up and what she was gaining in social change. But Agnes was more interested in watching Lily Wu circle around behind the audience. Someone draped a coat over the actress’s shoulders. This woman was to be her next-door neighbor. Mentally she fidgeted for pencil and paper. The old Mandarin finished his didactic monologue and the audience began a rhythmic clapping. They turned to look at Agnes in the last row.

  “They want the foreign woman to perform,” Ding Ling said, her color high.

  “I’m not an actress.”

  “But surely you can perform something!”

  Agnes, edgy with stage fright, started down the aisle that the soldiers opened up for her. Someone fixed her in a flashlight beam. In the center of the bare dirt stage she began to sing “Streets of Laredo.” As she cast the American tune out onto the Chinese night, the mountains of Colorado seemed as near as Shaanxi Province. Lit by music, time, and distance, her youth now felt happy and luminous. She sang all the verses. When she finished, Ding Ling came down the aisle.

  “They want a speech!” she said. “They want to hear you talk!” Agnes was now into the swing of things. She addressed the audience—most had never seen an American woman before. With Ding Ling translating, she told them about her own country, about the American Revolution, the nationalist struggle in India, about fascism in Germany, Japan, China. She ended with something she knew well: tenant farming in Missouri, and coal mining in Colorado.