The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  Ivy told me they were thanking us, but I almost didn’t care anymore. I wanted to punch someone, Xi Jinping, the portrait of Mao, my father, myself. I wanted to destroy something. It was balled up in my shoulders. All the romantic country bullshit was dreamed up by people like me who breezed through these places and thought there was something ennobling about sticking seeds in mud all day or hacking bamboo with a machete in a hundred degrees even though I’d never do it myself for a second, and even if I did I’d start bitching after ten minutes for a break.

  Hongjin wanted a smoke. He slapped me on the shoulder and we went outside.

  “You saw how they look at me, right? Why are you so fucking rich? Your money must be dirty. It must be corrupted. You must do bad things. That is the attitude.”

  “I didn’t see it, man,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Oh, man, these people are poor. The fucked-up part is they were probably rich landlords a hundred years ago. I can tell from the old Amah’s bound feet. Fuck, man.”

  I could only think of one thing to say back. “Fuck, man.”

  “There is a new saying in China—life is like being raped, if you can’t stop it, just enjoy it.”

  “That’s a terrible saying.”

  “It means life is shit and you can’t change it. Nothing you can do.”

  “I know what it means. It’s still terrible.”

  He smiled at that and put his hands on his hips. “Be careful in Beijing, okay? Secret police everywhere. You’re eye candy, you know? Serious. My friend’s door was kicked down by police for posting shit on Weibo. And no jury in China. Lawyers give judges juicy fat bribes. It is a rotten apple from the root. Lin Yutang was right. ‘Every man past forty is a crook.’”

  * * *

  Hongjin dropped us off nearby at the Chenzou West Railway Station. He was going to listen to thrash metal the whole way back to the factory. This was his favorite music, but he’d spared us on the ride up. We thanked him for that. Said our goodbyes. Then we got on the train heading north for Beijing. I fell asleep almost immediately, and when I woke up we were crossing the Yellow River basin outside Zhengzhou, the powdery yellow dust of the loess plains chattering against the train’s sides. The river was all muddy and yellow with silt. They called it the river of sorrow from all the floods and famine. It did seem very romantic, and even though I’d never seen this place before, I started feeling real fucking nostalgic as if I had. What was that? This overrefined, overindulgent sense of nostalgia.

  We rumbled across the Henan oil fields, and on the horizon, the silhouettes of thousands of horsehead pumps sawing up and down in unison like the whole earth was sighing. Then it was the great delta plains, with the green-and-blue mountains way off to the west. Closer were the sandstone foothills of the coal mines outside Taiyuan.

  “Tell me a story,” Ivy said. “About your family.”

  I told her about my uncle Mo sweeping the factory floor while a mile away a boy fresh out of the war rubbed Tung oil on the blond stock of his Ruger .22, enjoying the strong nutty smell when a bullet suddenly discharged from his rifle, broke through the window and spun a whole fucking mile straight into Uncle Mo’s right temple, who calmly released his broom and dropped dead on the floor. I told her how his wife, Ethel, the artist, went mad and started painting the same portrait of him thousands of times. I told her about me and Bernie laying jump ropes end to end in the grass in a ring and beating the shit out of each other with boxing gloves. Or how my mother used to set a pot of matzo ball soup steaming on the stove and lock herself in the room for days.

  I told her about Mom sewing my name onto everything. My hats, my belt, my underwear.

  “That’s crazy,” Ivy said.

  “I know. Why would I take my underwear off at school?”

  Ivy giggled.

  “I asked my mother the same question. She said, ‘Who knows why you do anything?’ I said, ‘Ma, it’s not a Roman bathhouse. The other boys wouldn’t put on the wrong underwear.’ And she said, ‘I’m not worried about other boys.’”

  “She sounds funny,” Ivy said.

  “She is,” I said. “I think she is. Hard to say. I think she’d like you.”

  You could see Ivy’s top front teeth when she smiled. One was turned in a little, but otherwise they were real straight and white. Dad would like that if he could get past everything else. Like most things, he found the current state of dental hygiene sickening.

  As I was talking, we ran past a range of karst peaks, steep escarpments and ridges of craggy limestone sloping into loose red clay, and we started to see roads and tall housing complexes on the city outskirts, and then with a pop the train dipped underground and the cabin lights came on, and I talked us all the way into the Beijing station in Dongcheng.

  The conductors blew their whistles and flared their hands to keep order, but the passengers were already climbing through the open windows and clogging the vestibules, trying to get off the train. We pushed through the thick crowd to the subway and rode only a few stops before getting off at Tiananmen station in the underpass beneath the Forbidden City.

  In the distance, over by the stairs, a man on kneepads with no arms begged for change and I felt a horrible drop in my gut, because I recognized those suppurate blisters and scars as benzene burns. In any shoe factory when the cement glue gets too close to the heat setters, it goes up like kindling, causing those types of burns.

  It wasn’t my factory though. It was someplace else. Nothing to do with me.

  Ivy told me the placard around his neck said that his factory had locked the doors from the outside and no one could get out. He also claimed that he was a descendant of Empress Cixi, and I saw people laughing as they hustled past him. His legs were white as corn silk where the charred flesh had fallen off in patches. Again and again he rolled forward trying to stand up. Out of all the people streaming through the corridor it was me he stared at, like he knew me from somewhere, eyes bloodshot and gums black, he rolled forward and lunged at me, calling me batgwai, white devil, and Ivy hooked my elbow with her arm and quickly pulled me away.

  When we came out of the ground, I could see on the northwest corner the modular police security hut that admitted us into the square, but first we were funneled into a tight cordon of fences, a single winding chute with the bright sun shining off the metal railings.

  Suddenly the crowd dropped into a single file.

  “None of this was here,” Ivy said.

  We inched forward. A woman in a white crocheted shift was reapplying her lipstick in the reflection of her husband’s sunglasses.

  “Take out your passport,” Ivy said, once we were close to the security check.

  She swung her canvas messenger bag off her shoulder and set it down on the conveyor belt that ran through an X-ray machine. She handed the guard her ID.

  Before us stood a Chinese policeman in a starched short-sleeved white military shirt, peaked cap and white cloth gloves. Beside him were soldiers in dark green fatigues and army boots, machine guns crossing their chests.

  The policeman ran my passport through the machine, then he did the same with Ivy’s. He spent twice as long with her ID, flipped it around, scanned it under some blue light, spoke to her in Chinese. He had a chiseled face. If she was nervous, she didn’t show it. He flicked his chin toward the metal detector and we passed through into the square.

  The space was gray, dour, wide as six soccer fields. And the two massive buildings—the National Museum and the Great Hall of the People—loomed over the square. We were on the west side, close to the Great Hall where two Chinese men dressed as Santa Claus were performing choreographed kung fu for a crowd.

  Ivy had her hand out in front of her like she was feeling for a bannister that wasn’t there. Her head turned back over her shoulder to the giant portrait of Mao—a smug shit-eating grin on his face—hanging down off the rostrum of T
iananmen Gate.

  It was him she was looking at, not the glittering gold roofs of the Forbidden City behind him, all the while walking forward, and at the last second I pulled her away from a marble lion.

  Ivy led me south toward the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a tall granite obelisk at the center of the square. Flanking the monument on both sides sat two enormous video screens flashing white characters against a red background. They were surrounded by a horseshoe of Chinese tourists.

  Ivy translated the words in this robotic voice as they scrolled across the screen. “Prosperity, Democracy, Harmony, Justice, Rule of Law, Patriotism, Integrity, Bullshit.”

  “I like that last one,” I said, and she smiled.

  When we reached the terrace on the northwest side of the monument, Ivy stopped and touched the marble balustrade, traced it slowly with her finger and I did the same thing.

  “This is where I found her,” Ivy said.

  She then pointed to the Great Hall and then north to Tiananmen Gate.

  “This was all covered in tents. Many many. Here I find Hu Dan. Hawthorns around her neck. So skinny. Could barely smile. She was part of the hunger strike and I knew it. It said in The Monkey King, our favorite book, that if you wear hawthorns, you won’t starve.”

  Ivy slumped against the balustrade.

  “She used to read me that old, old book. We shared a bed. She was beautiful. They said when she walked by even the river stopped to watch. Back home they said that.”

  Her eyes welled and her voice quavered as she spoke. “I can’t believe I was here.”

  She pointed to the area around the flagpole. “We built a bonfire and burned the People’s Daily for calling us criminals. Then it rained. It made this sound, when it hit the fire. And it made smoke. Smelled like a ferret. I spit pumpkin seed shells into the fire.”

  A group of soldiers marched past us in starched white uniforms and long shiny boots. The tourists all ran over to get their picture as they kicked their legs up high in perfect unison.

  Locked legs. Their legs shot up almost parallel to the ground and then the foot came down perfectly flat, no heel strike or push off, nothing of a human gait. Their boots aimed straight and fell even. Arms too, only from the elbow, firing off at a precise forty-five degrees. Palms flat. Heads still. No shoulder drop. Everything sparkling and shining, buttons and brims and trouser stripes. Men pretending not to have knees. Pretending not to love a single thing in the world.

  It stunned me, really. This zombie ballet.

  This is how the Great Hall would march if it came loose from its slab and grew legs. No, this is how the Nazis marched. That’s what stunned me. I’d seen it before. If only in those grainy black-and-white videos of the Wehrmacht goose-stepping across the terrace in Nuremberg, and yet I knew that walk as intimately as if they’d marched straight through my bedroom. Field-gray gabardine. Thousands of them. Stone-faced machines, their legs flying out like switchblades, the glinting bayonet blades up by their shoulders and their legs locked like there were iron rods in them, nothing else, no sap, no human, just iron. And I was afraid. Deeply afraid of them.

  Ivy’s voice suddenly ripped past me.

  “I wanted her to leave the protest. Before the trouble. Everyone knew. All day and night. Loudspeakers warning us. Evacuate immediately.”

  Two beefy-looking soldiers in short-sleeved fatigues and peaked black caps and fingerless black gloves passed by us walking German shepherds.

  “Helicopters,” she said, a little too loudly. “Yellow jackets. White paper falling. Thousands of leaflets. Get out. Before too late.”

  The soldiers glared at her briefly and continued their patrol.

  “So hot,” she said. “And we had no fresh water. And the square smelled like piss.”

  She turned. The two JumboTrons flashed video of Tibetans in cowboy hats prancing through a field of barley then a cut to Chinese Turks in tasseled fezzes dancing with red ribbons.

  Ivy tugged on my sleeve, her eyes wide and alert.

  I wished I could see what she was seeing. I needed to if I was ever going to understand her.

  I followed her up to the third terrace of the monument. There was a round discoloration in the marble carving. A spackle job covering a hole that was perfectly round. About the size of a bullet.

  “That’s when it happened,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  She walked down the steps of the monument and a few paces toward the Great Hall and stopped. “The army. Over there under Tiananmen Gate. And over there through the museum and here from the Great Hall. Shiny steel helmets. Many. With machine guns. Metal toeplates on their boots made this terrible sound.”

  She tapped the gray paving stone with her sandals.

  “Coming from there too,” Ivy said, pointing to the portico of the Great Hall, when the bronze doors suddenly opened and out walked a throng of schoolkids who started swinging on the granite columns.

  “I had gone into the square to keep the bonfire alive. The rain was cold. And then I heard shots way off. I ran back for Hu Dan. She was standing at the bottom of the monument holding an umbrella. I grab her wrist and I say run. She doesn’t move. Refuses. Then I see a young man running at us in a white shirt covered in blood, the whole chest, and he says they’re shooting. They’re shooting everyone.”

  Right then a kid rode up to us with a satchel full of Little Red Mao books.

  “Five yuan,” he said to me. I shook my head. Then he seemed to notice Ivy. He leaned his forearms against the bike handle and listened.

  “Machine guns. Tanks. Trucks. The army facing us. An officer lean out of the army truck with bullhorn. He’s got on this cap with a gold emblem. A lieutenant. And us. Students. But mostly ordinary people. Bicycles stacked high as a blockade. The front row holding hands. Human chain. Singing ‘Internationale.’”

  She bowed out her elbows as if on either side the students were looping their arms through hers, and then she clasped her hands by her waist to lock them all together. She staked her feet wide apart and puffed out her chest. Then she began singing “Internationale” in a low, scratchy voice.

  A crowd was starting to gather. Tourists with shopping bags. Teens in school uniforms. A vendor with knockoff handbags. They stopped to listen. Plenty of them understood English. Knew what Ivy was saying.

  And then she was doing the lieutenant. Moving in quick steps back and forth. She was talking louder now. Holding up an invisible bullhorn, saying, “Evacuate immediately. Clear the way or we shoot.”

  She said that right in Tiananmen Square. Not loudly, but saying it at all is loud enough. I felt a tightening along my shoulders. I should get her out of here. You weren’t supposed to mention the day much less go to the square and fucking act it out.

  I looked around. Past the crowd, over by the security hut, I saw the policemen with AK-47s strapped across their backs. They were looking in our direction, interested in what was going on. The commotion. But they were far enough away where they couldn’t hear.

  “Hey, we should get going,” I said to Ivy.

  She ignored me. “You can’t shoot the revolution,” Ivy said. Her fists balled. She wasn’t herself anymore. An angry student now. She was there. In the moment so deeply that I’m not sure she realized how risky it was.

  Her eyes drew a hard line. Her chin dropped. She was the lieutenant.

  “Get out,” she said.

  Then she was that same student stepping forward. A boy.

  “Fuck your ancestors,” she said. The boy’s words.

  The crowd gasped.

  Ivy ducked down, on the balls of her feet. Cowering. The terrified students.

  Then she shouted an order in Chinese in the lieutenant’s deep voice. She imitated the soldiers lifting their guns to their shoulders and aiming at the people.

  “I pulled Hu Dan’s
arm,” Ivy said. “Come, come. Run. She pushed me off. I said, ‘Are you crazy? You are about to die.’”

  The crowd pushed forward, bunching tighter. I narrowed my shoulders.

  “We were trapped,” Ivy continued. “The tanks, trucks—everything closing in. People started throwing bricks and glass bottles at the army. Then a horrible cracking sound. Bullets. Flashing. I can’t describe. And smoke. Before I could blink, the whole front row of students dropped. There were people and then they were gone. Innocent boys and girls.” She searched the faces of the crowd. “You understand?”

  Then she wasn’t acting anymore. She wasn’t anyone but herself. “Hu Dan,” she said, kneeling down and slapping the gray paving stones. “This spot. The end of my family.”

  The crowd murmured, growing restless. A guy next to me holding a boom box flicked his wrist saying, “I wipe my ass with this country.”

  I looked to the security hut. The officers were on their walkie-talkies looking over at us. “We need to go,” I said to Ivy. “Now. There are police everywhere.”

  She didn’t respond. I had to get her out of there.

  So I reached for Ivy’s elbow, but she brushed me off. She sat down on the ground and then she proceeded to lie flat on her back on the smooth stones with her arms and legs splayed out.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “I need you to get up. Before they see you.”

  It was too late. The officers started walking toward us. They were still a distance off.

  Some people stopped and pointed at Ivy. They laughed. The ones passing by or the ones who didn’t speak English thought it was some kind of modern play. They stopped and took pictures of her lying there on the granite flagstones with her arms spread in this impromptu demonstration they were all mistaking for some strange performance art piece.

  Her eyes were fixed straight ahead. “Water,” she murmured. “So hard to get. Fresh water. We were all so fucking thirsty.”

  “Hey, you got to get up,” I said. “I’m not kidding around.”