The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  There. He said it. Finally. And what was the answer? Ivy partly. For sure, Ivy. But that wasn’t all of it. What did we, me, my family, my ancestors—what did we make all these shoes for? To lift ourselves out of poverty and only to say to hell with the rest of you? To persecute others the same way we were persecuted?

  “I’m a believer,” I said.

  “In what?”

  “Democracy.”

  “A straight foot is not afraid of a crooked shoe?” he asked.

  I was not even sure what I was prepared to do at the factory. The system was fucked—but turning the factory into some kind of socialist collective wasn’t going to solve anything.

  Plus it had been all over the news recently. Factories crippled by strikes. Factories burned to the ground by workers, terrorists. For all I knew, Zhang had a hand in some of it. Was that what he was planning for my factory? Somehow I had to get the answers out of him without seeming too obvious.

  “Why factories?” I asked.

  “Instead of what? Students? Like Tiananmen. No, this new generation is cold. They know what the world is, but they think, ‘What can we do to change it? We are powerless. So I will do my things well and try to get successful. Why should I sacrifice my goals for bettering China?’ You understand, Alex?”

  “Sure. But why my factory?”

  “You found us,” he said.

  “I did?”

  “Yes. Because you know we’re right.”

  His eyes didn’t move off me, dark and hypnotic, and for a moment I thought he might be speaking the truth but I couldn’t tell if I trusted him.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said, trying another angle. “You ever feed your lizard anything big? Or you always give him crickets?”

  “Little food,” he answered.

  “Ever give him a rat or mouse to go after?” I asked.

  “A mouse?” He shook his head, lips pursed. “He is only juvenile. When he is adult, strong, maybe he eats bigger.”

  “Okay, why not give him a little mouse. He could easily take down a mouse.”

  “Mouse bites back. Defends itself. Too dangerous. No, no. And he would eat it. Even if it killed him. Eyes bigger than mouth or however this saying goes.”

  He drew his head back suddenly.

  “Why are you asking?” he said.

  “We’re talking,” I said.

  “Talk?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Just talk. Freedom of thought. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Freedom to talk. Listen, say I go out of my way to help you. Let’s say I want to do that for you. Where do we start?”

  He was silent for a moment. Blinking his thoughts into focus.

  “Start small and build up slow. Same as with the water dragon. Start small. Feed crickets.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Because it’s one thing to talk compassion, it’s another to talk revolution—”

  “No, no,” he said, waving his hands in protest. “Alex, the democratic revolution is a long road. I misled you, if you thought revolution means military—no, my goals are small-small. I am not rash. I don’t fear going slow. If China is a great country, it is only thanks to slow patience. This was the problem in Tiananmen. We were too idealistic and not willing to compromise. Had we just met with Premier Peng—then maybe a different outcome—who knows? Alex, let us not use the word revolution anymore, it is so far from my mind. I wouldn’t insult you. To say this to you, I would lose face.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Because if you go in representing the Democratic Revolutionary Party my father will bite back. He’ll shut you right down.”

  “Small, Alex,” he said, showing me with the end of his thumb and index finger, a sliver of space. “This small.”

  “What’s the move?”

  “A union,” he said, slapping his knees. “See? What did I say? Small. That’s all. A little union. These are everywhere now in China. Like fruit stand. It will be very familiar to you and your father. Hardly notice. Same as in the States. Bargain, compromise.”

  “And this is what you’ve done at other factories?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. It is delicate like cooking a small fish. We don’t want to eat misfortune.”

  “What about strikes?” I asked. “Do you support them?”

  “Of course. The workers must be allowed to strike. Without losing their jobs.”

  “See that’s the problem. That’s agitating. That’s aggressive. A strike would cripple the business. If that happens we’ll have a catastrophe.”

  It was true I wanted change, but I didn’t know if I could trust Zhang. He seemed a little nuts, frankly. Ivy had vouched for him. Called him intense. Maybe I should walk out—I kept thinking I should get up and leave, but something was keeping me there. Listening.

  “Méi shì, méi shì,” Zhang said. “No problem. This is not going to happen. It is only the extreme. This is what I thought you were asking. In the organizing I have done, we never strike. The right diplomacy and it never comes to this. I understand you. That is why I say small. Workers striking your factory is like a praying mantis trying to block a tank with his little arms. It is futile. No, you would just bring in new workers. This is not the way to solve problems.”

  “What is the way?”

  “Little meetings. You give Ivy a position. Let her educate workers. She can talk free and get them to consider joining the union. We see if it happens. Maybe a few meetings. Maybe they get bigger. Still nothing you can’t recognize. Talking. That’s all. Working together. Me and you. See, it’s smart thinking.”

  I looked at Ivy. Her face was drawn and anxious but her eyes were gentle even as they widened.

  I turned slowly back to face Zhang.

  “My great-grandfather wasn’t one of them but his brother was a member of the Bund, underground socialists, like you, and they got more recruits and grew bold. So they went to the Russian Rittmeister and said the leather workers want to unionize.”

  “This is when you had the arm tattoos of numbers?”

  “That came later. So the guy says, of course, only fair. What you need to do is go down to this town, fifteen miles away, and get your union cards. Great. They all go off like it’s a parade walking down the road, but when they reach the town it’s empty. All that’s left is the brick factory in the hands of the Cossacks. My great-granduncle says, ‘Where’s the union office, we come for our cards.’ And the commander leads them over to a clay pit in the ground.”

  “What happens?”

  “They made them strip down and shot them into the pit and covered it with clay. That was the end of the union. Finished after that.”

  “It is a horrible story,” Zhang said, “Almost same happened when my father spoke out against the party.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, improvising, speaking in a voice that I didn’t even fully recognize, “by wanting to do right, you only make it worse, I’m telling you. But my great-grandfather—he was Jewish too of course but pretended to be Polish. So he could go to school and so his own classmates wouldn’t throw rocks through his windows or break his ribs. A lot of Jews did that. Not that they were ashamed or anything, but it’s easier. Sometimes it’s better off to hide what you are. That’s how you survive.”

  Maybe it was the voice of my great-grandfather, who I’d only ever seen in one photo: seated at a workbench in Vilnius, pulling twine with his teeth, hog bristle and wax, welting an army boot. I didn’t see it, but people always said I looked like him.

  Zhang arched his eyebrows like he was impressed. “We stand in the same shoes,” he said. Then he suddenly stood up and, drawing his hand over his face, started pacing across the room.

  “Aiya,” he said. “Well, let me think over this. Because you introduce good points. I see. I need to think it out. I may even need the night to consider what you say and give you answer.”


  I sort of surprised myself, saying all that. Coming out of my own mouth just on instinct, no thinking. Same way I could see that the quarterlines on a pair of booties were off by a few millimeters without picking up a tape measure.

  Zhang continued pacing, stroking the side of his cheek.

  But what I told Zhang was right: everything had to stay quiet. The most minor change sent Dad into a tailspin—one time on the plane he looked over and I was using blue pen on the immigration form instead of black and that’s the kind of horseshit that gets your ass thrown on the blacklist—so I couldn’t imagine what he’d do with a factory strike.

  Zhang sat right back down and looked at me.

  “Nèige,” he said, “maybe you are correct. Black cat, white cat—as long as we catch mice, this is what is important. Yes? The color of the cat doesn’t need to be unions. You see, Alex,” he said tapping his head. “You think like I think. We are of one mind. Harmonious. Maybe we are separated brothers?”

  That made me feel better. Like we were the same—me and him. One guy. Not a world apart. Not all that different. I was doing the right thing. Maybe Zhang was all right. He wasn’t some quacked-out vigilante.

  I reclined into the couch and my shoulders sank into the back pillow, warm and snug, and to myself I was going, This is where you are. You’ve arrived. This place. A nice firm grip on me. Maybe it was because after a while I started to notice the way the Chinese kind of folded in their shoulders right as I passed on the street, like they didn’t want a hair follicle of mine grazing them, not so much as a skin cell rubbing off on them, and maybe Zhang, because of his past, knew that feeling.

  He was nodding his head and I found myself nodding back, and even though our mouths weren’t moving, we were agreeing on a lot of stuff.

  “Fate,” he continued, “brings people together no matter how far apart they are. Now there’s certain...responsibilities. You have to be careful what you say. Who you talk to. Because life can get difficult.”

  “For me?” I asked.

  “For you. If you speak to the wrong person. I wouldn’t be able to prevent consequences.”

  I turned to Ivy and her eyes narrowed at me, and her look confirmed what I thought. Zhang was warning me. Or, in his own polite way, he was actually threatening me. Meaning, if I made the wrong decisions, he would cause the consequences. Give the orders himself.

  I turned back to face him.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Good good.”

  Then we shook hands, his grip strong and cold. I shivered at this. Maybe his handshake. Maybe the word, fate, he’d said, like he knew something about me. I felt cold, even after he released my hand, the cold mixing with this image that came to me of two thousand dagongmei dragging me out of Plant C and toward the outdoor pavilion and one of them pushing the cold snout of a Walther PK to my temple and I smelled the cement glue on her hands, heard the hammer softly cock, felt her wrist shaking, and I fell into the brick-walled cellar of the synagogue beneath the Vilnius Opera house where my great-grandparents danced one last Freylekhs while Victor von Wahl split the backs of the Jewish Bund out in the palace courtyard with a bullwhip, and I crumbled into my grandmother’s lap as she tickled my feet and buried my face in her dark vinegar-scented neck, saying, Who’s a good boy.

  I pushed the thought away. Zhang’s eyes weren’t telling me this. About fate. I was just drawing on old movies. Walther’s the old James Bond gun. Probably didn’t even cock. Why would factory girls even have British secret agent guns? My mind was much better at paranoia than period details.

  Zhang’s dark eyes were on me.

  “I’m loyal,” I said.

  “We can trust you,” Zhang said, but it was hard to tell by his inflection if it was a question or a fact. A simple nod wouldn’t reassure him.

  “Yes,” I answered. “You can trust me. I’m your friend.”

  10

  A MAN IN a blue cloth jacket in the train berth beside us was eating ginger and pig’s feet, and our cabin filled with the scent of sweet vinegar. I swung my feet off the bed, climbed down the little ladder—Ivy asleep in the cot under mine—and I walked down to the food car squishing on longan shells thrown in the aisles.

  At the food car, I ordered fried peanuts and stood by the window, feeling my lips tingle from the salt, and I watched the maize fields slip past the window.

  I saw old crumbling watchtowers, and suddenly a red-and-yellow circus tent, the pink neon of a tall spoked Ferris wheel, the loopy parabola of roller coaster tracks—right out in the clearing of the maize field—and then that was all gone too.

  The train brakes squealed around a bend and it sounded like the pitched cry of the roller coaster grinding metal back at Revere Beach. Summer, and Dad had been protesting fun by wearing a wool suit on the beach in the dead of July. He was sitting stiff on a folding chair, sweating like a pig, and my mother was saying, “Can’t you pretend to enjoy it?” His oxfords touched the corner of my beach towel, right by my face. I could see the unsanded tips of his tassels—I knew them the way Ruxi’s little brother knew her sandals, and I could smell the fried clams from Kelly’s nearby and I saw the salt barnacles on the dock pilings, and the black girls braiding each other’s hair in the sash windows behind the boardwalk, and the street kids tagging the metal struts of the roller coaster, and the easels along the boardwalk where they’d airbrush your face on a T-shirt and I wanted one bad but worried I’d come out looking like some German wartime caricature.

  Enough. I was willing memories again. I didn’t feel the tug of them; no flip in my gut. It was all real distant and abstract, like that part of me was gone, missing like the sawed-off noses on the Buddhist busts at the Guangzhou Museum where Ivy had once taken me and we lagged behind the tour group, laughing as the security guards herded us along, saying, “Catch up! No sleepywalk!”

  I was in the right place. I was sure of it. What was here now? Grim-faced, half-asleep Chinese slumped at booth tables, mouths agape. The same position my workers would be in if the managers didn’t blow a whistle the moment a girl yawned.

  Forty people packed in this dining car. We had a rule at the factory that no more than twenty people could meet together recreationally. A Yong rule. But I was going to abolish that first thing when I got back to Foshan.

  I turned back to the window, to the jagged silhouette of karst mountains far off, and I let myself slip into this little fantasy of a packed meeting at my factory up on the third floor of Plant C. Nighttime. Everyone had brought makeshift lamps and hung them on the back of chairs and they were shushing each other to be quiet. Smelled of sweat and sweet cement glue. Everyone took off their hats out of respect for Ivy, who was standing up on a workbench in a white work shirt, stiff and crisp, and a thin red belt, talking to the workers. The meeting was packed, not a seat left, people had to climb up on the leather horses just to listen. Ivy was punching the air with her fist, talking about real doctors, not the sham ones on our payroll. Talking about training courses. Accounting. Business admin. English lessons. OSHA seminars.

  And maybe I got up there to speak at the meeting and I told them what? Told them how my grandfather made a pair of shoes for FDR. Black wing tip brogues. Crepe soles. Size twelve. The highlight of Zayde’s whole life. Back before OSHA. Back when safety training meant watching the machinist with the fewest scars on his forearms. Now things needed to be different. Go forward, not back. We weren’t in darkness anymore. And they were applauding. The whole crowd was.

  Still I was on this train staring out the window and the world seemed fast and trackless, seemed to peel itself away layer by layer without the slightest feeling of flight.

  I was daydreaming away, feeling real good, when I suddenly felt a shift in the current of air, and I knew someone was standing right behind me. I turned around. An old Chinese woman with lips stained bloodred and teeth blac
k, like she’d just bitten the head off a rooster, was standing there with a fistful of betel nuts in her hand. She was right up in my face, talking fast and crazy. I couldn’t understand. And as everyone in the canteen started laughing, my good feeling drained away fast, and I wasn’t part of some revolutionary factory meeting, I was just a white guy sweating his balls off on a train. I backed away from the old woman, away from the window, hustling back to my little berth, the woman’s voice echoing in my head, gweilo, ghost man, she’d said, looking at me like I had a sawed-off nose, like she knew I was always going to be incomplete.

  * * *

  By the time the train pulled into the Guangzhou Railway Station it was getting late. Ivy was talking about riding the subway down to Foshan, then catching a bus to the factory, but I finally convinced her to take some money for a taxi ride. We were at the curb stand where the taxis lined up. I held open the door for her but she suddenly froze.

  “It’s okay?” she said.

  I told her don’t be ridiculous, I wasn’t going to let her take the subway alone at night, but the way she squeezed her eyebrows together made me realize she wasn’t talking about the stupid subway. She meant it. Everything in Beijing. And everything to come.

  I nodded. She gave me a kiss on the lips and ducked into the cab. Words still didn’t come to me in the cab, but it wasn’t a bad feeling, just a quiet one.

  In the lobby of my hotel, the employees came running up for the welcoming ritual, and I just flipped my chin at everyone, even Karri over at her desk. I didn’t play along like usual. Something was off. I felt like I wasn’t in my body.

  Upstairs I stood in the center of my room and the fresh fruit, champagne and chocolate were arranged on the tray on the bed and everything was back in its proper location, and this instinct surged up—not quite even an articulate feeling—but I found myself opening the closet door and taking out my suitcase. I started throwing in my underwear and shirts from the drawers. There was a manager’s house at the factory, next to the dorms. Yong sometimes stayed there. That was where I should be. Move to the factory. Out of the hotel. Get out of here. There was a clear thought, the first in a while, and it scared the shit out of me.