by Ling Zhang
As Buffalo walked alongside us in his boots, he kicked a stone. He suddenly stopped, took off his boots, and scraped the mud from them with a branch. Then, he tied the laces together and slung them around his neck.
“It’s not cold. It makes me sweat to wear them,” he said.
I knew he couldn’t bear to wear them. He couldn’t bear to let the rocks scratch the boots. Even after we were out of earshot of the firecrackers, Buffalo walked with me.
“Just for a little farther, sir. Just a few more steps,” he said, grinning. My enormous pack made him look like a snail. It wasn’t until we reached the sampan that Buffalo finally stopped and returned my pack. He stood on the slope facing the sampan, waving. As the boat drifted farther and farther away, he waved with bigger and bigger gestures. The pair of military boots around his neck swayed like two sparrow hawks jumping about his shoulders. Eventually, he became just a black speck in the mountains. At that time, I didn’t know this was farewell. Farewell to these mountains, this bay of water, this row of terrace fields, the strange cattle half-submerged in the water, the malaria, the cholera, and the typhoid we narrowly escaped, and farewell to the people we would have never known if not for the war.
And it was farewell to Wende.
Perhaps I’d guessed it was farewell, but I didn’t want to face it. To the person who is leaving, the attraction of what lies ahead is greater than what lies behind. Recollection is something that is left for later.
And just like that, I left Yuehu.
Liu Zhaohu: Chiang Kai-shek’s Discarded Old Shoes
Before we came to Yuehu, we each walked our own path and had our own stories. But the war was like a typhoon, blowing us off our own roads and throwing us together. We were wounded by the collision, so your bodies were marked with my blood, and your skin stuck to my wounds. I was part of your story, and you were part of mine.
Compared with our whole lives’ experiences, the time we were in one another’s lives was actually very short, though it looms disproportionately large in the illusion of my memory. During my life, I used to treat days as units, and I couldn’t sift out those overlapping parts, like separating mineral from sand. After I died, I realized those days only measured up to a total of two years—for Pastor Billy and me, only about five percent of our lives. For Ian, who lived to ninety-four, two years is a negligible portion of his time on earth. When we left Yuehu, the fork in the road where we waved goodbye was the end of our story.
I mean our shared story, of course. Our individual stories continued for some time, except for Pastor Billy’s. Actually, from the first time I saw Pastor Billy, I had sensed something ominous. Pastor Billy, did you ever take a careful look in the mirror? Your philtrum is very short, creating the illusion that your mouth sits directly beneath your nose. To Chinese people, this indicates that one won’t be able to live to old age. You’re shaking your head. Your God didn’t teach this, so you don’t believe it. I didn’t believe such things either, but facts proved that seemingly absurd superstitions were actually the accumulation and repetition of experience. I’ve learned to speak from fact, not emotion.
Ian, I see you yawning. I know you’re bored with this. You’re waiting for a different topic. I was surprised to learn that even as ghosts, we can still be tired. That night, when we were all drinking in Pastor Billy’s kitchen after the news of the truce, I was tired and wanted to go back and sleep. You held my arm and wouldn’t let me go. You taught me an English phrase I’d never seen in any textbook: there will be sleeping enough in the grave. I later taught that phrase to my students. Who would’ve imagined that even now that you’re dead, you still don’t get enough sleep? I know you’re both eager to hear what happened to Ah Yan. But don’t worry, my story is closely linked to hers. I can’t extract her from my story. Before you hear her story, you must listen to mine, because I’m her cause and also her consequence.
After leaving Yuehu, my army friends and I went to Nantong to accept the surrender of Japanese soldiers. Accepting the surrender was fast, but taking over the enemy’s property was complicated and tedious. It was full of all sorts of transactions, both aboveboard and shady, but thankfully I was hardly involved in all that. I was sent to study English for half a year, then assigned to a training school for police officers in Nantong, where I taught English. I met a common acquaintance of ours there: my captain from our camp. He also ended up at the police officer training school—as my direct superior no less. There’s a Chinese saying that one can’t avoid one’s enemy and another that says there’s no mutual understanding without a fight. That was the situation between the captain and me. Our countless bumps had smoothed out our edges. We weren’t merely colleagues who got along, but friends who had a few drinks and complained to one another when we were lonely. You wouldn’t know what it was like at that time, during the last few years of the Nationalist government’s rule and their witch hunt for Communists and sympathizers. Everyone grew an extra set of eyes to guard against each other, and the standard for measuring true friends was whether they could drink together and speak the truth without fear. The captain and I were such friends. Continuing the habit developed in camp, I always called him Captain, even though his title at the academy was director.
I had a thousand reasons to leave the school and return to my village. Although I was an instructor and no one expected me to carry a gun into battle, I felt hugely frustrated with the civil wars, which came one after another. I couldn’t tell whether peace was the goal or the excuse for fighting. I’d become bored with military uniforms. Also, since my and Ah Yan’s fathers had been killed by the Japanese, the Yao family tea garden had been neglected and was in desperate need of someone to restore it. Moreover, my family had been harassed by the Japanese, and my mother was frightened. She’d grown old and sickly and was usually confined to bed. She’d moved to my brother’s house, but he was often working in the county seat. My sister-in-law was left alone to care for a sickly elderly person and two mischievous young ones. It was inevitable that she would sometimes struggle. Looking back now, if I’d taken any one of those excuses and left my post to return to Sishiyi Bu, my life and Ah Yan’s might have been completely different. But I was always hesitant, never able to make up my mind. I wrote to my mother and told her I had a teaching allowance in addition to a regular military salary. What I earned in Nantong was much more than I could make farming at home. If I stayed, I could better reduce the burden on my brother’s family.
Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth. My mother and I both knew the real reason I stayed away, and in this we were always complicit. I was afraid that if I went back to Sishiyi Bu, Ah Yan would follow me back. Before leaving Yuehu, I had passed my mother’s message to Pastor Billy, inviting Ah Yan to come home. Pastor Billy asked me what role she would occupy if she did so. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My mother inviting her back was a matter of conscience. Conscience was the most vicious mosquito in the world, biting her all the time, day and night, giving her no peace. And when I delivered my mother’s message, that too was an act of conscience. Just as the mosquito bit my mother, it bit me too, only much more fiercely. But conscience is such a fragile thing. It couldn’t survive the daylight, so I didn’t dare say this to Ah Yan’s face. I couldn’t even escape Pastor Billy’s eyes. In fact, I had secretly hoped Ah Yan would refuse me, though this is the first time I’ve admitted it. I couldn’t fail to deliver my mother’s offer, just as she couldn’t fail to make it. The mosquito would not spare us. But if Ah Yan rejected the offer, the mosquito would have no place to bite, our consciences would be placated, and we would be at peace. My mother and I had never talked openly about it. We didn’t need to. At the most crucial time, bonds of blood formed our most reliable alliance.
In Yuehu, I saw Ah Yan’s transformation with my own eyes. Her mind grew up, and her original layer of thin, sorrowful skin no longer covered her. She sloughed off the old skin and left it behind, becoming a completely new person. Each time I saw her (and you coul
d count on one hand how many times I saw her in Yuehu), I could almost smell the youth oozing from her. It was the scent of buds on tree branches and mountain grass growing wild. But that was only against the backdrop of Yuehu. The minute I mentally put her back in the context of Sishiyi Bu, I saw her body crushed beneath Scabby, her legs kicking wildly like a mantis’s. The image was carved into my mind, and it would take years before it gradually eroded. Although we hadn’t prayed to heaven and earth before the spirit tablets of our ancestral gods or held a wedding banquet before the villagers, I had put my fingerprint on the contract drawn up by Yang Deshun, witnessed by him and the security group head. Even without them, I couldn’t lie to myself. As long as Ah Yan and I were in Sishiyi Bu, she was my woman, and I was her man. I couldn’t face this reality. In my youth, when my body was strong but my thinking shallow, chastity was a chasm that couldn’t be bridged. When my body began to fade and my mind grew stronger, I realized that chastity was just a fragile illusion. Unfortunately, by that time, Ah Yan and I had already taken too many wrong turns.
In fact, even in Yuehu, I realized that Ah Yan had turned the page on me. She looked at me disdainfully, as if I were a pile of shit she had accidentally stepped in. But like most men, I had a bit of ego rooted at the bottom of my heart. That pathetic little bit of ego interacted with the air like yeast, turning “impossible” into “maybe.” I was unwilling to let go of the place I had held in her heart, though in reality it was already gone. I was afraid, but I hoped that I was the permanent master of that position. Later, I realized that while I was worried that Ah Yan would follow me back to Sishiyi Bu, she was stuck in Yuehu, waiting for two letters from afar that hadn’t come. Of course, they held different places in her heart. One was pure concern, while the other was concern mixed with anticipation. At the time, her heart was full, leaving no place at all for my existence. Looking back now, I see that the years after leaving Yuehu are a series of wrong decisions made at the wrong time in the wrong place. In Chinese, we say, “Yin and yang are in the wrong places.” When I should have gone home, I didn’t, then when I did go home, it was at the worst possible time. During those years, opportunity was like a mischievous child playing hide-and-seek with me. When I looked for it, it hid in dark corners, outside my field of vision. When I stayed put, it ran ahead of me, tempting me to take a false step.
In the autumn of my third year at the training school, I finally decided to go home. It wasn’t an impulsive decision, but the result of the emotional powder keg that had built up over the years and was finally ignited by a few unexpected incidents. It was like a bomb with a long fuse. All anyone saw was the explosion, completely missing the long process of detonation. In fact, it’s not even really accurate to put it that way, because the bomb never exploded at all. The fuse was cut just before detonation. That autumn, the civil war opened a crucial, incandescent scene in Liaoning and Shenyang, when the Communist forces began to put real pressure on the Kuomintang forces in northeastern China. In an institution as insignificant as the police training school, we only got information from public sources like newspapers and radio broadcasts, and all the news was of victory, with the same details over and over. If one spent a little effort altering a few things like the time, location, and names of people involved, the same news could be broadcast for any occasion. However, there were always some people at the school who could get another version of the story through other channels. We didn’t know who they were, but we knew they were there, maybe stepping on our shadows, because we would find mysterious notes in the pockets of the uniforms we left in the office from time to time. Sometimes when we got up in the morning, there would be several mimeographed newsletters stuck in the crack between our bedroom door and its frame. The content in this poorly printed material, still smelling of ink, was vastly different from the official reports. The two sides need only switch the characters in the events, and it would immediately become the propaganda of the other party. We casually pretended to browse the contents of the papers, then just as casually shredded them and threw them away. We never talked about these reports, but we always read them with a tacit understanding. At that stage, nearly all my acquaintances distrusted the authorities. We had all lost confidence in the current political situation.
But that wasn’t the most direct reason for my decision to go home. The dissolution of my hesitation came from a piece of news the captain passed to me at the risk of losing his own head. My name was included on a list of people being secretly investigated by our superiors. I wasn’t sure what channels they’d gone through to find out that I had previously conspired to go to Yan’an before applying to the training camp in Yuehu. The investigation found no definitive evidence and was left unconcluded. My former accomplices were at the other end of the Liaoshen Campaign, gaining ground against the Kuomintang, and couldn’t serve as the witnesses my superiors needed. Even so, I became untrustworthy in the eyes of my superiors, and my every move was monitored. I was suddenly an inmate in a prison without walls. I decided to leave, citing my mother’s illness as a reason.
I had even considered how to deal with the Ah Yan situation. Ah Yan’s rape by the Japanese had occurred five years ago, and in the five years since, much had happened. New memories would eventually dilute the old, just as new grass eventually covers old grass. I put my hope in forgetfulness. After I returned home and settled down, I planned to go to Yuehu to get Ah Yan. She was a good woman, and I was a good man. How could two good people be destroyed by a bad thing? We could find a way to kill that horrible demon in my mind, even if in the clumsiest and most time-consuming way. Time would be sandpaper that would slowly smooth away all the scars.
But in the end, I didn’t follow through. Just as I was preparing to submit my resignation, I received a letter from my mother saying Ah Yan had returned to Sishiyi Bu with a child who was under two years old. They asked Ah Yan who the child’s father was, but Ah Yan just said the child was a gift from God. People in the village began to gossip. They said that the foreign pastor who’d taken Ah Yan in had gone back to America, and before he left, he said he would only be gone for a month or two, but no word had been heard from him since. They said he had left money with Ah Yan, but it had run out, so she slept with anyone, one day getting food from this man, the next day getting a few coins from someone else. By the time her belly grew big, she didn’t even know whose child was inside it. Later, when her reputation became totally irreparable, the men would take advantage of her, but would give her nothing in return. When she had no other option, she returned to Sishiyi Bu, because the tea garden was there. Even if it was derelict, it was at least a piece of land she could sell for a little money.
After many years, I realized the rumors circulating in the village were just stories, even if they had real beginnings. But I believed them at the time, because a person’s thinking runs in a straight line when they are young, unaware that there may be a curve, a bend, sometimes even a few various branches, in the journey from information heard to conclusion drawn. When I heard a seemingly true starting point, I believed that the conclusion must be true too. The age of the child Ah Yan brought back to the village also seemed to verify the logic of the rumors. The child was less than two, so the affair happened after we left Yuehu. My mother also told me that the first thing Ah Yan did was sell the Yao family’s tea garden. These two things convinced me of the truth of these rumors.
So I stupidly—almost obtusely—ignored an obvious flaw in the rumors. Pastor Billy had taught Ah Yan to treat sick people, so she could easily live a much better life than an ordinary village woman in most places. This was especially true in Yuehu, where her abilities were already recognized by the local villagers, and even the cows in the field knew she was the “woman doctor.” She didn’t need to loosen her waistband in exchange for food, nor did she have to return to Sishiyi Bu to make a living. But a person will always believe what they want to believe. And I didn’t understand that a child’s age was just a number, and that any number i
n the world could be changed. The truth of the child’s birthday was in the mother’s hands. At the time, I never suspected that in order to conceal the child’s background, she had deliberately pushed the child’s birthday forward by six months. I didn’t consider that she’d sold her ancestors’ land not because she was desperate, but because she had no hands to maintain it. This chance decision helped her avoid a bigger disaster due to the Agrarian Reform Law after the Communist takeover in 1949. Since she had no land, she was later classified, naturally, as a poor peasant by the new government. But that was later.
I also committed an error in judgment so stupid it was beyond reason. I ignored the fact that homesickness can be the main source of a person’s decision to return home. So, upon receiving this letter from my mother, I dismissed the idea of going home. It had taken me so many years to gather enough courage to deal with one beast of the heart before this, and at that moment, I had to face a whole jungle full of them. I couldn’t clean the mud smeared on Ah Yan by those rumors, even if I used all the water in the river that flowed below the forty-one steps. I couldn’t live with such a woman. I couldn’t imagine spending my life in such shame.
So I changed my plan, deciding to spend a few more months at the police officer training school. I could use that time to publish a statement in the newspaper to break off my relationship with Ah Yan, which was the method people living in the city used to disavow a marriage. My disappointment in Ah Yan made me eager to start a family. I would follow the oldest method, using a matchmaker to help me find an honest, modest woman to marry, then take her to Sishiyi Bu, where she would help me take care of my elderly mother, whom I had only seen a few times over the past several years. I was only twenty-three at the time, but I felt like an old bird with broken wings. I just wanted to go back to my nest and live out my declining years. Before I had ever really seen the sky, I’d lost my desire to fly. A few days later, I published a statement in the newspaper in Nantong concerning my relationship with Ah Yan. Fearing no one in Sishiyi Bu would see it, I sent a clipping home to my mother and asked her to give it to Ah Yan. After doing this, I suddenly felt like a large stone that had been weighing on me was finally lifted. Perhaps, subconsciously, I’d been wanting to do this for a long time, but I hadn’t found the right opportunity. Now, Ah Yan herself had provided me with the perfect excuse.
