The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers

by Anton Piatigorsky

Tse-tung throws his father the empty sack, which lands at his feet.

  “You think I’m stupid? You emptied it in the pond.”

  “Planted,” says Tse-tung.

  Jen-sheng snatches up the sack and looks inside. His black and fractured smile spreads as he discovers Tse-tung’s copy of Water Margin in the sack, proof of procrastination. He holds up the incriminating text and peers at his son. “What’s this?”

  “A book,” answers Tse-tung. “Filled with words and stories. Ever hear of books?”

  “You think you’re funny?” Jen-sheng opens the book and studies the text, squinting with incomprehension at several phrases and then shutting it with a thud. “You read this garbage instead of planting?”

  “I did my planting. Ask Wu.”

  “It’s time you throw away this shit and do something useful.” Jen-sheng tosses the book on the ground. “If you aren’t going to read the classics, at least count the remaining shoots and figure out how long it will take to get them all planted.”

  “Not now,” says Tse-tung. “I’m hungry. I’ve been working all day.”

  “You can have a bowl of rice. Eat quickly and get counting. Wen!”

  Wen Ch’i-mei drops her mending on the floor and scurries into the kitchen. Tse-tung hangs his hat by the door and follows her, passing his taciturn bride, neither of them acknowledging the other. In the kitchen, Tse-tung moves beside his mother, who is scooping a ball of cold rice into a bowl.

  “I did my planting,” he says to her. “I did it all.”

  Wen Ch’i-mei hands him the bowl as she glances over her shoulder to make sure they’re alone. “Read your book at the table,” she whispers. “But don’t speak to him. It will make him crazy.” She hands her son a pair of chopsticks to punctuate the advice.

  Tse-tung returns to the central room, scoops Water Margin off the ground, and takes it with him to the table. He’s sitting directly across from his father, but rather than looking at the man, he cracks open his book and lays his rice bowl on its edge. His stomach turns, pain gnawing his intestines. He’s far too anxious and fatigued to focus on the words, but if he eats and pretends to read, it will have the same effect.

  “So that’s what you’re going to do, huh?” asks his incredulous father. “Read stupid books instead of helping me? No manly work? Makes sense for a girl like you. I guess you’d also prefer to read by yourself than to fuck your wife. Is that right, woman? Does he take his books into bed at night instead of fucking you? Hey, I have a good idea, Tse-tung. When you’ve finished that book and your tenth bowl of my rice, why don’t you take your virgin wife’s sewing and finish that for her too? I’ll bet you’re good at it. It’s the right kind of work for you.”

  Tse-tung concentrates on the printed characters before him, although they’ve twisted and warped through the haze of his angry stare. What kind of man, he wonders, does nothing when attacked? He steals a glance at Miss Luo, who’s blushing and hunched over, her face buried in her sewing. She must think him an ineffectual coward, not so different from the lump of rice in his bowl.

  He can’t stand it. Tse-tung stands on his chair and reaches up to the drying chu tin peppers that dangle from the rafters. Aware that everyone’s watching, he picks a long and thin specimen of deep purplish red, sure to be exceptionally strong, and pops the whole thing into his mouth. He chews the pepper and retakes his seat, firing glances across the table at his father to make sure he’s noticed, his tongue and cheeks inflamed, his brow popping with perspiration, but still focused on keeping his expression as bland as the rice he now uses to chase away the spice. This will show his father the difference between a coward girl like Luo and a man tough enough to eat a chu tin pepper in a single bite.

  Jen-sheng leans back in his chair and laughs at his son. “If you think that’s hot,” he says mockingly, “just wait until it comes out the other end.”

  Tse-tung leans over his book and blocks his view of his father with a hand on his brow. He pretends to read Water Margin as he works the pepper with his teeth. He’s sweating profusely, trying to resist spitting the burning mash out of his mouth.

  “Oh yes, tough man! Eating chu tin like a real son of Hunan. Are you sure you don’t need any water with that, Tse-tung?”

  “He doesn’t need water,” says Wen Ch’i-mei, glaring at her husband from her seat on the k’ang.

  “Look at him sweat!” Jen-sheng says, leaning in so Tse-tung can’t ignore him. “Too hot for you, little boy?”

  “What are you reading, Tse-tung?” counters his mother.

  Jen-sheng grunts and rolls his shoulders. He sits back and grabs a wrapped rice shoot from the table.

  “Must be a very interesting book to hold your attention like that,” continues Wen Ch’i-mei. “I think you’ll be a scholar when you grow up, don’t you, Tse-tung?” She turns to woman Luo beside her on the k’ang and touches her shoulder. “Hey, you’re a very lucky woman, miss. Your husband will be a clerk someday and take you to the yamen in Changsha. And from there, who knows? Tse-tung is very smart, as you can see. Maybe he’ll go to Peking to work in Empress Dowager’s court.”

  “Shut up, Wen!” shouts Jen-sheng. He’s begun to shred the bright green leaves of the young shoot in his hand, scattering torn bits on the floor by his feet.

  “When he passes the state exam, he’ll work for anyone in China.”

  “I said shut up. You talk too much, Wen Ch’i-mei!” The family’s patriarch, having reduced the rice plant in his hands to a nest of mangled roots, now looks down and realizes what he’s done. He drops the remaining bits on the floor and shoots a desperate glance at unnamed woman Luo, hoping she hasn’t seen.

  “You’re always reading, aren’t you, Tse-tung?” continues Wen Ch’i-mei. “I’ll bet you know Confucius better than anyone in China. I know what’s in store for you. You’ll pass the exam and work in government, I’m sure of it. You won’t stay a farmer in Shaoshan.”

  Jen-sheng squirms, wrinkles his brow, and spits on the floor. He grabs another wrapped rice shoot, but then thinks better of it and tosses it back onto the table. He stands, puffs his chest, and looks at woman Luo. “Tse-tung,” he says. “Finish these.” He indicates the pile of unwrapped rice plants. “I have better things to do,” he adds, and leaves the room.

  Wen Ch’i-mei grins at Tse-tung, but he only responds by lowering his head deeper into his book. Something’s wrong. Wen Ch’i-mei realizes it immediately and her smile wanes. In the past, when they’ve collaborated on a plan to defeat Jen-sheng, they’ve shared triumphant looks after the old man has stomped out of the room. Maybe Tse-tung didn’t see his father leave, or maybe chewing that pepper has caused him more pain than she’s realized.

  “It must be nice,” Wen Ch’i-mei says to woman Luo, although her gaze remains fixed on her son, “to have a husband who can read poetry. I wish I had a man like that.”

  Tse-tung covers his ears with his hands. “Leave me alone,” he says. “I want to eat and go to sleep.”

  Wen Ch’i-mei offers a single nod and then turns her attention back to her sewing. Distracted by Tse-tung’s strange reaction, she misses a stitch and jabs the needle into her finger. She doesn’t yelp; she merely pops the bloody fingertip into her mouth and sucks, continuing to work as if nothing happened.

  The combined forces of Jen-sheng’s cruelty, Wen Ch’i-mei’s ignorance, and his wife’s mere presence have so pressurized Tse-tung that he’s sweating and feels ready to explode, like a sealed pot of boiling rice. His family is absurd and infuriating. He has to leave this town at once. He has to join the Ko-lao hui. His naive mother claims that he’ll pass the state exam and then advance in society as a scholar and clerk, but Tse-tung knows that she’s proud of a future that will never exist. His mother knows nothing of the sweeping reforms overtaking China. She was not with Tse-tung last month when he visited his cousin Xilian at the eastern end of Shaoshan valley. Xilian had just returned from an extended study in Changsha’s Western school, and told Tse-tung that th
e traditional Confucian examinations had been abolished two years earlier, meaning that there would be no more free tickets for any of the humbly born in China. I will never be a scholar! Tse-tung wants to scream at his stupid mother. I will never be a government clerk! But he knows he can’t even do something as basic as inform his mother of what has happened in her own country. How could the simple woman understand that incomprehensible revolution? What could he say to her? That his entire education thus far, all the beatings he took at the miserable village school, all his tedious rote memorization of Three Character Classic and the standard Confucian texts, all of that, his whole life, was a complete and total waste of time and effort, because there will be no more official state exams? She’d never believe him. Every illiterate peasant in the land knows that the Confucian exam system is the staple of advancement in China, just as it’s been for well over two thousand years. Something so primal and predictable as the state exam can’t simply be abolished and gone forever. That would be like the sun forgetting to rise. No, he can’t say a word about it.

  And so, instead of saying anything, Tse-tung burns with rage, furious at his ignorant ox of a mother for stupidly lording a defunct exam over her husband for power. She has no power, and neither does he. His father is sure to get the last laugh.

  It’s a perfect night in Shaoshan. A cool breeze rustles the trees and keeps the mosquitoes from biting. In the glow of the full moon, Tse-tung discerns the larger pebbles in the path before him, the swishing rice shoots to either side, and the stone bridge over the river. Silhouettes of farmhouses dot the hills along the valley. He is skipping along the path, prowling and playing a tiger, as the river gurgles beside him. A mouse scuttles across the path, but before it disappears into the greenery, Tse-tung imagines pouncing on it, snatching it up by the tail, and gobbling it down in a single bite. He growls, as deeply as possible, although he doesn’t sound much like a tiger, and then continues on towards his house on the north slope of the hill.

  He is clutching Words of Warning to an Affluent Age, borrowed from his cousin Xilian, or rather, pressed into his hand with his cousin’s firm command that he read it. The brief passages he skimmed while sitting on a big stone by the river have already inspired him. The book is an uncompromising polemic against the British and the Japanese, how they continue their ruthless exploitation of China’s land and long-suffering people, mining the country’s wealth, selling cheap cigarettes, patrolling the Hunanese rivers in their brazen gunboats. There are descriptions of wonders scarcely imaginable: ships propelled across oceans by magical steam engines, and small metallic devices that enable conversation between people hundreds of miles apart. Tse-tung is eager to get home and read this book from cover to cover, no matter that it’s long past dark and he’s expected to rise with the sun. He’s amazed that Xilian has learned these things at his school; it’s such a different education from the one he’s received in the village. Tse-tung would never have been such a nuisance to his teacher and tutors if they’d taught him these modern subjects instead of the same useless Confucian prescripts a thousand times over, phrases and ideas he’d already memorized and could have taught to the others. In Changsha, Xilian says, you can learn mathematics and geography, and they teach you about the governments of other countries, and you learn about the functioning of the natural world.

  Tse-tung kicks a stone and listens to it splash into the river off the path. He’s tempted by the prospect of going to a modern school, not that it would be easy to get accepted. But Tse-tung also wonders if he really needs more time with books. Isn’t he already too placid and quiet, too high-voiced and feminine? No woman wants to marry another woman. He needs to develop his strength, discipline, and rigour. Sung Chiang might have been a scholarly clerk at the yamen, but that hero only distinguished himself when he became a man of action, a fighter on the run, a leader of radical bandits. Books are never enough.

  As he marches beside the river, his gangly legs bouncing him with each step, Tse-tung oscillates between the contradictory desires of pursuing banditry and continuing his education. He is plagued by rudimentary questions about his own character. Does he love to read or hate it? Does he want to perform yuan fang or not? Does he want to fight the world like an outlaw or study it like a scholar? He’s always trapped between contradictions, never has an answer, never feels complete.

  He walks up the dirt path from the fish pond to his house. The windows are dark, and a cooing dove, having made its nest in the overhanging eaves, silences in honour of his approach. The gravel in the courtyard crunches under his sandals. He can smell traces of ash and boiled vegetables from dinner. Everyone must be sleeping. Tse-tung inches open the front door to prevent it from creaking.

  The central room’s large table has been pushed aside to make room for a mattress on the floor. In the moonlight, Tse-tung discerns a body, curled and covered by a thin blanket. He approaches, and the person, hearing his feet, shudders and coils tighter, releasing staccato sobs that are muffled by the straw.

  “Mama?”

  Wen Ch’i-mei throws an arm over her head, covering her face with her bicep. Tse-tung kneels beside her and is about to lay his hand on his mother’s heaving back, but she twists away before he can touch her.

  “What happened?” he asks. “Are you all right?”

  “Go to bed, Tse-tung.”

  Tse-tung leans back but lingers on one knee, neither standing nor sitting, neither touching her nor moving away. He is startled by his mother’s fury, never having heard such bite in her tone. Wen Ch’i-mei squirms under the lumpy cotton blanket, as if to escape the boy’s audible breathing, and coils even tighter—like a snake consuming its own tail—but then she thrashes with frustration when the self-consumption proves impossible.

  “I said go to bed, Tse-tung,” she hisses. Now she drops her arm and turns her head to attack him at full volume. “Why can’t you ever go to bed on time, you stupid boy! Can’t you see you’re not wanted? You never go to bed! You ruin everything! Go to bed! Go! Now!”

  Tse-tung jumps up, tripping over his heel and stumbling, dropping Words of Warning to an Affluent Age. He crouches and gropes for his book, but in his haste he jams his middle finger against the leg of a chair. He yelps and shakes the screaming finger. His other hand pats around in the darkness for his lost book. He tries not to make a sound when he sneaks into his room.

  Behind the closed door, Tse-tung grips Words of Warning with both hands. Stunned and confused, his imagination concocts fanciful explanations for his mother’s fury. His father’s anger and vindictiveness must be the product of a communicable disease, and his ceaseless spitting and frothing has spread the offending plague, so that his mother now lies stricken, racked by the disease’s characteristic fever and fury. Or no, he now thinks, his thoughts replacing one absurdity with another, maybe his mother’s crazy superstition, her insistent belief in evil spirits, which she has tried so urgently to pass on to him, has proven true. Maybe in vengeance for her child’s denial, she’s been possessed by a vampire, bent on feeding from the primary artery between them, their sacred bond. Tse-tung stands wondering by the door.

  There’s only a single small window in Tse-tung’s room, but in the strong moonlight he can see his bed. His cotton quilt and fresh pillows lie undisturbed. It takes a moment for Tse-tung to remember that this is strange. An empty bed. Every night, for ten days, unnamed woman Luo has endured her nightly torture of lying motionless, awaiting his decision to perform or not perform yuan fang. She has nowhere else to sleep.

  The realization dawns on Tse-tung. He raises the book and covers his face, pressing his nose flat. The old miser. Never could resist a piece of fertile ground. Never one to pass over what others have left fallow. Tse-tung drops his book and remains standing by the door, unable to move his limbs.

  It feels as if decades pass before he sits. Decades more pass before he lies on the unbroken surface of his bed. His stomach churns and gnaws and he farts a dozen times. His head pounds, the pain tea
ring around the bone and pulsing above his neck. He forgets about Words of Warning to an Affluent Age, but in the days to come and for the rest of his life, that book will remind him of this evening.

  He lies on the bed for hours.

  In his mind, Tse-tung is on the deck of a boat at sea, cast adrift. He has heard about the sea, its giant waves and its wide horizon, an endlessness that nobody can seem to describe quite to his satisfaction. He would like to be out there on the water, drifting. Although he wants the peace of a calm sea, a storm rolls over his boat in a single blink. Waves rise into swells the size of mountains, rivalling any of those in Hunan. He’s in a valley between swells, a cavernous seascape, and now a gigantic wave is about to collapse on his boat. Tse-tung has never seen the sea, and is incapable of imagining it accurately, so the wave is a solid thing, resembling a Hunanese rock cliff, but bigger than any he’s ever seen, and it falls upon him in crumbling chunks and boulders, like an avalanche. Although the rock-wave is sure to crush him, Tse-tung stands on the deck against it. A moment before he’s engulfed, he dives into the sea and swims deep.

  He can imagine what that feels like, as swimming in the ocean can’t be much different from swimming in the river. Tse-tung wills himself to breathe under water. When he rises, he discovers yet another wave crashing, again as solid as a mountain, and so he dives deeper still; there’s no limit to the power of his lungs. For hours he will fight these mountains, diving, rising, and diving again, until he’s exhausted. But the storm passes.

  Tse-tung lies on his back and floats, light as a bug on the lily pond, studying the moon out the window. He feels the perfect light breeze and tropical warmth of Hunan in the middle of the night. He tells himself that no man has ever defeated these mountain-waves before. He is sure his daring will be the gossip in cities across China, and that the news will travel through the countryside, across the great river, south to Shaoshan. Everyone will learn of his accomplishment.

  When the sun finally rises, and his room is engulfed in pink and yellow and light blue, he allows himself to drift in a tranquil sea, the fish gathering around him in admiration, their fins cracking through the surface of the water. Thousands of mesmerized fish. “Here is the man who has beaten a storm by disappearing into our realm,” the fish whisper to each other, and they k’ou-t’ou to Tse-tung, although their gestures are halting and absurd and incomplete. Tse-tung laughs at them. “Come, come,” he says out loud. “No need for that. You’re my brothers. You are family. I will swim with you, and you can follow me forever. Yes, I’ll swim all the way to the coast, and by the time I hit land, a million of your compatriots will have followed me.”