by Leigh Lyn
“I get that, but why is Niang so sure you died?”
“Your mother was a little girl whose perception was shaped by the stories of people around her. Anyway, the true face of the revolution revealed itself when the red guards turned into hyenas. And they smelled blood when your grandfather showed up.” Shi Gong’s face was calm in contrast to his voice, which sounded indignant. “In their eyes, I was guilty by birth, but your great-grandfather was the revolution’s true demon, having been a landlord all his life. His fate was sealed the second he stepped off the train.”
“Were you there when it happened.”
“I was. Even though the hyenas threw me in a forced labor camp where I spent a decade and a half during the great famine, the family never forgave me. I ate dirt, dug and hewed roads in these mountains and sat through thought-reforming ideological classes.”
With a smirk on his face, he chanted, “Wei renmin fuwu... Gan xiang gan gan... Zao fan you li... Bai hua qi fang, bai jia zheng ming,” His hand wagged the air to the beat of his voice. “I sat through four thousand one hundred eighteen hours of slogans, each one of them working hard to ‘purify’ my soul.”
Shi Gong told me how he was the thinnest dissident. “Yet I managed to survive while other men dropped dead one after another. The prison director even made me his chef, although there was no food to cook. Using our old family recipes and presumed inedible ingredients like tree roots, bark, and woody fungi, I made nourishing dishes.”
“How did you end up at G.Y.?” I asked.
“Eventually, they released everyone, the revisionists, the counter-revolutionaries, and the bourgeoisie. I made a living practicing and teaching Chinese medicine and studied Western pharmaceutics in my free time.” Shi Gong gazed into the distance. “I was determined to catch up on the lost years.”
“It must be in the family; Niang can’t get enough of herbs either.”
A smile appeared on Shi Gong’s face. “Niang, huh? Little Tai is the ruling matriarch of the family now, is she?”
“She tries.”
“History hops along as we all try to sweep our mistakes under the carpet... Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was assigned to work for this company producing Chinese medicine.”
“G.Y.?”
Shi Gong shook his head. “The name is the same, but I would call it the predecessor of G.Y. It was tough. Having rejected and purged the capitalists, we were lost in quicksand politics, break-neck reforms and either mind-numbing or mind-boggling methodology. In the nineties, the direction became clearer, after which politics turned cold and brittle.”
Seeing the clouded gaze in my eyes, Shi Gong explained, “When members of the old school with their bold revolutionary ideas started to die off, and their well-educated offspring inherited the reign—”
“The princelings?”
“Yes, the princelings. Seasoned by the histories of their family and being less insecure, less idealistic and emotional, they started using their head rather than their heart. The country was still ‘reforming,’ but they’d learned their lesson about the danger of using collective mass hysteria and were dealing with it in a more intelligent and sophisticated way.”
“How do you mean?”
Stealthily, Shi Gong glanced at the entrance and lowered his voice. “They infiltrate at a corporate level.”
“Like spies do?”
“No, they simply install their own men at the very top, into the brain of major corporations, into the board of directors. It’s not really a secret, and a lot of companies love this connection and see the relation as a blessing.”
“Is that how you joined G.Y.?” I asked.
“God, no! I wasn’t talking about me. But my company was doing well, having expanded and increased our market share.” Shi Gong paused to look at me. “Guess who the Party installed at the top of G.Y.?”
Having no idea, I shrugged.
“My sister Li Meng.”
I jolted my head back, placing the name as one Peter had mentioned once. Was it she who had arrived earlier at 8th Sky? Something in Shi Gong’s gloomy demeanor told me not to ask.
“G.Y. had done a good job raising her. She’d grown up to be smart, joining the Party young, etcetera. She knew about my company through me and proposed it to her superiors.”
“How did that go?”
“I’m not politically inclined, but if 8th Sky is the heart of G.Y., then Li Meng and the board are the brains. With the government’s back-up, red tape was removed easier and faster. Through Li Meng, I also bumped into an old friend called Lao Da with whom I was in the labor camp. A few years after being released, he was reinstated in the Party.”
“He went from prison back into the Party?”
“Yes, after the gang of four was arrested, a lot of their opponents were reinstated. It was Lao Da and I who had the idea for the experiment after the crackdown in 1989. He helped me after a spiritual cult stirred things up and threatened social harmony; Lao Da instructed me to take my experiments further still.”
“Experiments on humans?”
Shi Gong narrowed his eyes. “As a doctor, I think of them as experiments for humans. They’re voluntary experiments with written consent from all participants.”
“Do the people involved think that too?”
Shi Gong snapped. “To be frank, Lin, medical tests have been done all over the world since God knows when. Some people do it for altruistic reasons, some are amply remunerated and, for some, it’s their only hope for a cure.”
“Their only hope?”
“You have those, but there are others. This is creative destruction, positive disintegration, the rebirth of the phoenix; it’s all the same and meant to streamline the systems and improve them, whether it’s social, economic, or human. Do you mind?” Shi Gong leaned back and frowned at me.
“I know too little to mind,” I hurried to say.
Shi Gong sighed. “I said it before, and I’ll say it again. No country does positive disintegration better than China. Some people judge us, finding the natural evolutionary course of events amoral, but only without the hindrance of morals can real progress take its full course.”
“Evolutionary progress, is this what the experiment is about?”
“The objective of the bio-genetic engineering in this country is to explore methods to control the physiological functions of humans. I can’t say too much except that our experiment is geared toward the psychological. Trust me though, we have strict protocols and a full team to monitor the health of the participants in every aspect.”
“You do?”
“Yes, we do! In fact, I aborted a major experiment when I discovered the risks exceeded our initial assumptions.”
“What was that about?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you one day, but not today.”
Damn!
“Why don’t you tell me why you are seeing a therapist?” Shi Gong asked.
“I had a breakdown due to stress caused by a project at work.” Seeing the concerned look on his face, I added. “I’m not mad.”
“The G.Y. project you were inspecting?” Shi Gong asked, with a pensive gaze.
“Yes.”
“There’s a strong stigma of mental illness here, but madness is nothing but nobility of soul at odds with circumstances, a poet once said.” She Gong said, without looking me in the eye. “Let’s head back.”
Chapter 45
A silver moon hung low in the sky when we came out of the temple, and the soft croaking of frogs filled the air. The sound had grown on me and its unflinching disregard for drama and tragedy soothed yet perplexed me. After we returned, Shi Gong put me up in his spare room. Exhausted, I dozed off within minutes of closing my eyes, feeling much better than I had earlier. But soon two voices, a high shrill voice and a raspy one, entered my sleep.
As I lay in a semi-state of slumber, the voices escalated. Words and sentences permeated through. At first, I registered the words without understanding them.
It was you, wasn’t it?… You did it… Did what?… You used her… Why shouldn’t I if they did me?… Not the same… Why not?… Are the people you use not human?…
“I’m here!” I reached out in my dream, but they didn’t hear. The voices were outside my bubble of thick slumber, and I couldn’t see them through the white gauze that separated us.
Do you remember?… The heartlessness… Don’t you remember?… The cruelty… Why involve them?… Your agenda?… Your idea… Your dream… Your vengeance…
On and on the duel of voices went until the raspy voice was smothered and drowned by the shrill one, and the vagary simmered down in the backwash of my dream. Alarmed by the disturbing silence, I opened my eyes. It was dark. The voices were gone, and so was the croaking of the frogs. I got up. The door sprang open the instant I lay my hand on the doorknob. I listened for the voices, the stalling of breath, the shuffling of feet, anything that spiked through the whistling of the wind, and the shifting of leaves and told me where to find their owners. An inexplicable urge compelled me on.
A cold breeze coming through the open windows lifted the curtains and sent the white gauze billowing across the space. Through the moving and layered veils, I looked into the courtyard and saw I was not alone. Standing under the night sky next to a towering pine tree with his back to me was a thin bare-chested man. Long, knobby arms milled around as the body swayed. My first thought was Shi Gong. The man swung around one hundred and eighty degrees. Instinctively, I stepped back into the obscurity of the white veils.
Suddenly, the image of a man slashing a gleaming chopper into his sweat-covered chest flashed in front of my eyes. It was the bonesetter who had treated my disjointed elbow decades ago. Was Shi Gong also conjuring a spirit to exercise his body in a martial arts practice? With his eyes closed and his bony face possessed, the man squatted with trance-like stillness. Growling something under his breath, he abruptly speared open his eyes, which bulged and rolled left and right, his milling arms following their direction. He yelped and rushed toward a wooden rack. He grabbed a glimmering sword and, with both hands raised, he brought the blade parallel to his lips. Yelping again, he swirled around the yard like a dancer in a trance-like sword routine.
Somewhere, I heard a tune. Curious, I waded through the billowing white gauze into the yard and stood a few meters behind the wooden rack as Shi Gong carved the air with his glimmering sword. Grunting and spinning heedlessly, he suddenly swayed toward me with frightening speed.
Stunned, I gasped for air and fell backward. Scrambling up, I ran and grabbed the nearest weapon I saw: a spear with two crescent-shaped knives mirroring one another hanging from the weapon rack. Just in time, I raised it above my head to block Shi Gong’s sword from slicing me like soapsuds. With a disturbing sheen over his wild eyes, his contorted face glistened with sweat. Grunting in a strange tongue, he disengaged his sword and readied himself to hack at me from a different angle. With a scream loud enough to awaken any ghost or spectral, he swung the crescent knives above my head and let them fall.
Next, a total blackness spilled into my vision, absorbing all sounds and thoughts. When I opened my eyes again, I was back in Shi Gong’s spare room, and the sun was warming the thin air. I’d never been so relieved to wake up and lay still to soak in the silence. If, as Dr. Wen always says, dreams reflect one’s innermost thoughts, fears, and desires, then I should be perturbed.
It was past eleven, I got up and went into the living room to find it empty. “Shi Gong?” I called out and walked out into the yard. A pile of clothes lay on the ground in a pool of dark substance. The garden wall was splashed with dark red paint. I got closer and stepped into some gooey gluey stuff that made my shoe stick. What I saw next made my heart clench and my knees shake. Buried in the pile of clothes was a thin body. Its gruesome head was split like a log, and a gray, mushy tissue had spilled out. Worst of all was the eye. The split occurred through an eye socket and had torn the eyeball, but the murky gray of the iris was staring at me nonetheless.
Horrified, I rubbed my eyes and looked again, wishing my vision would revert back to normal, but it didn’t. The long thin skull was cracked like a walnut shell. Lumps of his brain were scattered around the eyeball-like tofu floating in a puddle of dark-red like Ma Po Tofu. Emptied of its contents, the pink, smooth inside of the skull gaped at me as a pungent smell of body fluids, decaying flesh, and death rose up my nose. I stumbled to the edge of the yard and threw up the sour watery contents of my stomach, which traveled down the ravine and scattered in the wind before it reached the Yangtze below.
Dazed, I squatted down and put my head between my knees. Was my dream last night not a dream after all? My heart beat erratically as I gasped for air. Fighting the thought that I had anything to do with this, I checked my clothes for blood stains. There were none. I couldn’t have. Could I? If it wasn’t me, then who? Good God, what was I to do? If I reported this, I would be the prime suspect. I might never get out of this, innocent or not. An intense fear took over my mind.
Panic-stricken, I grabbed my bag and, in a dream-like frenzy, I scurried out of 8th Sky. Without any idea how to get down the mountain, I ran. My only clue was that, as long as I went downhill, I’d eventually reach the Daning River. After tracking non-stop for I didn’t know how many days, I stumbled through several layers of sky separated by misty clouds. I survived on sour berries I picked from bushes until I reached a flat terrain, which remained flat, and I knew I’d reached the foot of the Gorge. Robbed of any sense of direction, panic washed over me once again. Every which way I went or looked, the scenery was the same.
Surrounded by prehistoric trees, animal cries, and oppressive humidity, I was afloat between reality and a dreamlike consciousness. The thought of death persisted; this time my own. I pictured my exhausted body becoming part of the immense wilderness around me. Not unlike the corpse of a bird I saw disintegrate in a quiet corner of a field over the course of a year when I was little. It dawned on me the twins would never know what happened to me nor would I ever know what would happen to them were I to perish here.
Exhausted and a hair-width from defeat, I squatted down on the forest floor, closed my eyes, cleared every thought in my head, and listened. Everywhere I went the following days, I did the same: I held my breath and listened until I heard the faint but heavenly sound of gurgling water.
The second time the sun rose over the Daning River, I settled at the water’s edge with a t-shirt tied to a branch and waited. Despite my dire situation, I told myself I was lucky to be alive, surviving on a fish I caught on the previous day. Dazed, dirty, and tired, I hung on, convincing myself that, sooner or later, a boat must pass.
When one finally did on the fourth day, warm tears streamed down my dirty face. The small barge was owned by a middle-aged couple. A little boy sat at the back of the deck; a thin rope tied his waist to the mast. At first, they were suspicious of me, a seemingly crazed woman with ripped clothes and manic hair. Only when I offered them all the cash I had left did they agree to take me to Chongqing.
During the entire boat trip, I sat in the opening of the cabin, hugging my legs, rocking back and forth. The image of a gory pile of bloodied clothes and bones kept flashing in front of my eyes. My mind looped through endless possibilities of what could have happened.
Dazed, dirty, and tired, I stepped off the boat in Chongqing two days later. I went to the airport, cleaned up in the bathroom, bought new clothes and a ticket with my credit card. I slept through the entire flight and, by the afternoon, I was back in Hong Kong.
Once I was home, I cleaned up again and covered my blisters and bruises with make-up. When Mimi and Maxy came home from school, I had passed out in bed and did not wake until the next day, feeling grateful for being home and, at the same time, frightened for the future. One after another, dire questions popped up, forcing themselves to the forefront of my mind: What if the dream-like incidence was not a dream? Who had killed Shifu? Had my obsessive propping in the past p
ushed me over the edge like Niang said they would? Did the elastic band of my poor mind snap?
“Where did you go, Bob?” Maxy asked. “You’ve been away for eight days.”
“Sorry, sweetie,” I put my arms around her. “I was swarmed at work.”
“Poor Bob,” Mimi reached up and put her palm on the top of my head. Children are gullible. But then, why shouldn’t they believe me?
“I’ve missed you,” Mimi said.
An overwhelming sense of guilt washed over me. How I’d neglected the twins. Drowned by issues that affected them too, I’d not only not found any solution or exit, I’d made it much worse while presuming Maria would stand in for me.
On top, I had missed a whole week of work. Although Peter was the best, I could tell he was not happy when I told him I had to attend to a personal crisis.
“Another one?” he asked, with eyes widened.
“Yeah,” I stammered. “I know you said I should come to you whenever I have problems, but it was the kind of crisis that did not allow me to make the necessary arrangements first or schedule a more appropriate time.”
“I see.” Peter’s eyes widened further. “Well… I suppose the important thing is you’re back.”
The bottom line was I had a lot to make up for. In the week after I came back, I worked hard and spent the rest of the time with the twins, although my mind kept wandering.
I kept reliving fragments of my visit to 8th Sky. Shi Gong’s murky eyes, the way the bonesetter milled his arms, swayed his body, and stormed at me with raised swords above his head. I remembered the swooshing sound of the crescent knives falling, all the imageries, sounds, voices and smells replayed, again and again. Not to speak of the skull, the mutilated eye, which shifted with each replay, becoming more aware of me watching it until it was following me wherever I went. Shivering, I would close my eyes and shake the image out of my mind.
