by Ling Zhang
When I started the school the previous year, I had planned to remarry Ah Yan. Using the word “remarry” not only lacks rigor, but is a bit absurd. According to the contract to which we had affixed our fingerprints, she was my wife. According to the announcement in the Nantong newspaper, she was my ex-wife. In truth, she had never been my wife, much less my ex-wife. Now, though the woman I wanted to marry had never been truly my wife or my ex-wife, the only word I could think of to describe what I hoped to do was “remarriage.” Even if I had skin as tough as sandpaper, I wouldn’t be able to look Ah Yan in the eyes and say the word “marriage” to her, so I prayed that heaven would grant me courage. Before I started the school, I’d burned incense and prayed to my ancestors and secretly asked for a sign from heaven. If heaven would send a female student to my school, I would speak to Ah Yan about marriage. For this marriage, I wanted to do something grand, in front of all Sishiyi Bu, to wash away the shame of the newspaper declaration. As for the ill will in my mother’s heart, it would only take one word to defuse it: I would tell her Ah May was my daughter.
That day when I walked into my humble classroom, I felt there was no shadow that could hide the sun, no worms infecting the trees, no burr in my throat, and no crooked tendon in my ankle. I felt as refreshed as a newly born child who’d never experienced any filth or pain. I was so happy that I decided on the spot not to teach from the textbook, but to teach my students a song. I taught them “Picking Tea Leaves and Catching Butterflies,” a song that everyone in the village learned to sing at an early age, but only in the local dialect. That day, I wrote the lyrics on the shabby blackboard, and I taught them the proper Mandarin pronunciation for each word.
The stream is clear and long
With beautiful scenery on both banks
Even with a song so familiar one could sing it in their sleep, when the lyrics were rendered into the official language, it was a little funny. The children couldn’t help but turn into a giggling bundle as they sang, rubbing their bellies. As we laughed, two strange faces appeared at the window. I first noticed the two noses looked like white water chestnuts pressed against the glass, then the blue uniforms. Finally, I saw Mauser pistols on their belts. I thought a new task force had arrived at the village. I didn’t realize that their arrival had anything to do with me until they burst into the room and shouted my name.
“Spy trained by American imperialists, evil remnant of the Kuomintang . . .”
They read out my crimes one by one. There were many. A fleet of planes flew through my brain, until finally all I heard was the gale bursting from their wings.
They handed me a piece of paper, words crawling across it like hundreds of ants. I gave my temple a hard pinch to try to knead the scattered fragments of my brain into a whole. I saw then that it was the registration list from the training camp in Yuehu. I found my name on it, with my number beside it, embraced in parentheses, 635. In a blank space on top of the paper was an oval stamp, washed dark red over time. The seal read “Top Secret.” As I was pushed out of the classroom in handcuffs by those two men, Ah May suddenly roused from the shock. Like a leopard, she leaped up and hung herself from my arm with both hands. Her fingers almost embedded themselves in my flesh. Nobody could have peeled her from my body without an ax or a knife. She hung on to me, dragging along the ground for some distance. Eventually, the police officers had no choice but to release me and let me persuade Ah May to let go.
I picked her up, sat her on my knee, and said softly in her ear, “By the time you go home and finish learning the words in the textbook, I’ll be back.” But I couldn’t keep that promise. When I saw her again, it was five years later. She’d finished the primary school textbook I’d made and was using it to teach Yang Jianguo, who was almost four years younger than her.
I was thrust into a beat-up military jeep, and, as I was driven to the entrance of the village, I suddenly heard a sharp cry from Ah May. The shattering cry broke the sun into a million pieces, turning it into a gong full of cracks.
“Daddy!” she cried.
Sitting in the car, I felt pain where she had hung on to my arm. The farther away I moved from Sishiyi Bu, the sharper the pain became. I started to convulse, and yellow beads of sweat appeared on my forehead. This pain followed me for the rest of my life. The malignant tumor that later hollowed my body into an empty shell may have taken its first bite into me at that moment.
That place where Ah May dragged her feet—will the grass ever grow there again? I asked myself.
Pastor Billy: An Apology Seventy Years Overdue
I’m sorry, Liu Zhaohu. I have to interrupt you. The feet of the little girl in your story, Ah May, are not being dragged through the dirt of Sishiyi Bu. They’re being dragged through my heart, leaving a trail of blood behind them. It really hurts me. It’s strange, but the spirit still feels pain. I always thought that the spirit was the smoke that rises from life’s ashes, a gust of wind that sees the whole absurdity of life, but has escaped the fetters of life’s trivial emotions. I never imagined I could still be hurt.
The last time I felt pain was autumn seventy years ago, when I lay dying in the third-class cabin of the Jefferson. When I drifted awake from my high fever, I was surprised to see the Angel of Death. What I mean is, I saw his wings. No one can see the face of the Angel of Death, except God or the devil. His wings fluttered silently, and his huge black shadow fell on the wall. The wind from his wings made my skin freeze. The ship’s doctor must have seen the Angel of Death too, not on the wall, but in my eyes. I heard him whisper to his assistant to find a priest to take my last confession. My remaining strength was just sufficient for me to shake my head weakly but firmly. They’d probably forgotten that I wasn’t Catholic. Besides, I was a pastor, and I’d held the hands of countless people on the road between heaven and hell. I was familiar with that road, and I could walk it alone.
“Do you have anything to say?” the doctor whispered in my ear.
I knew it was euphemistic. He was asking if I had anything to confess before my soul was handed over to God. The ritual was like an examination. Once it was handed in, there was no turning back.
No, I said to myself. I’ve already said what should be said to God long ago. I knew the impermanence of life better than anyone. I didn’t leave any words until the last moment, because the last moment comes like a thief, and it can’t be foreseen.
Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain, not in my finger, which was swollen big as a wooden club, but in my heart. I could see Stella’s expression before me as she sat on the steps in front of the church in Yuehu, waiting for a letter that would never come. Now I know she was already pregnant when I left. All three of us—Liu Zhaohu, Ian, and me—we all abandoned her in the midst of loneliness, helplessness, panic, and fear at the same time, leaving her to fend for herself like a weed in the cold wind.
If I’d known I was making my final journey when I set out from Yuehu, I would have let go of the secret I’d held on to so tightly. If I had done that, maybe Liu Zhaohu wouldn’t have needed to jump overboard, risking his life to tell her the truth. Maybe he wouldn’t have even been on that ship at all. Maybe everything would have been completely different for both of them. The secret was that there was still a crack left open for Liu Zhaohu in Stella’s heart until the incident with Snot occurred. Stella could understand his distress about her virginity—that was a flaw common to most Chinese men. She could accept a universal flaw, but she couldn’t forgive a unique evil. The unique evil, in Stella’s mind, was that someone had circulated rumors about her at the training camp, even after she’d paid the price of abandoning her home to escape those rumors. She’d concluded that the person was Liu Zhaohu. Her suspicion wasn’t unreasonable, since the only people who knew about her past were Liu and me.
But I knew Liu was innocent. The real gossip was my cook. She’d helped me nurse Stella twice, and she knew all the details. She solemnly swore to keep her mouth shut, and she did, mostly. But unfortunately, she failed to
keep the secret in the privacy of her bedroom. She just couldn’t help but tell her husband, who was the cook for the Chinese students at the training camp and from the same village as Snot. In this way, the rumor went from one mouth to the next, each mouth hoping the next would be a clamshell and the rumor would form a pearl inside. Everyone who tells a secret hopes the listener will keep it. But sadly, no one’s mouth is a clamshell, and rumors leak everywhere. My cook, that poor, godly woman, knew that her failure to keep her promise had caused a great disaster. She felt she couldn’t face God, nor could she face Stella or me, so she resigned and left. Before leaving, she begged me not to tell her secret, so I never told anyone the reason for her departure.
I knew this incident was the final nail for Stella. From that time, she truly closed the door on Liu Zhaohu. At first, I concealed the truth because of my promise to the cook. Later, it was for my own selfish motives. I had fallen utterly in love with Stella. My selfish reason expanded, eventually completely overwhelming the original motivations for my silence. I knew Stella didn’t love me in that way, but I didn’t care. The war was a meat grinder and also a roller. It ground all life into meat and loam. It squeezed love into sympathy, attachment into trust, and carnal lust into a need to stay together for warmth. I firmly believed that sympathy, trust, and the need to stay together for warmth were stronger than love. In the ruins the hurricane of war had swept her through, the only person Stella could rely on was me, even after Liu Zhaohu and even after Ian. The only thing I hadn’t anticipated was that the Angel of Death would tower abruptly between Stella and me. If I had worn the prophet’s mantle, I would have long ago helped untie the knot in Stella’s heart and handed her over to Liu Zhaohu. Everything would have been different then.
Of course, even without me, the knot in Stella’s heart, like every knot, would eventually loosen, through some inexplicable karma or just the corrosive power of time. Resentment, misunderstandings, and alienation bred during the long waiting process, when this time could have been used to harvest love, happiness, and children.
So, Liu Zhaohu, I owe you a solemn apology, even now, seventy years later.
Liu Zhaohu: Secret Curls
Over the next several years, I had the same dream over and over. In the dream, a crimson ball of fire appeared in the sky and scorched my eyes, plunging me into darkness. It wasn’t an ordinary darkness, but a red darkness, like a patch of dark earth covered with crushed tomatoes. In that red darkness, there was no shape, no texture, and no layers. Unlike black darkness, no light could penetrate it. It went on forever, without limit or boundary, without beginning or end, creating the illusion that my eyes were always open. In my dream, I raised my arm, as heavy as a rock, to rub my closed eyelids, which were just as heavy. I was horrified to find that even when I closed my eyes, the red darkness was still there. It never got weary, and it never rested. I woke up in a sweat and was almost pleased to find that my surroundings were shrouded in a black darkness. Later, I came to realize that my recurring nightmare arose from my longing for daylight. My thirst for sunlight strayed when it entered my dreams and turned into the red darkness by mistake.
I’d been sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment, during which I was to work in a coal mine in a neighboring province. Every day when I got out of bed, changed into work clothes that fastened with straw strings in front, and crawled into the cage to be lowered down the shaft, the sun hadn’t yet shown its face. When I finished work and returned to the mouth of the shaft in the cage, the sun had already gone down. At night, while the stalemate between fatigue and insomnia raged, the neurons in my brain were unusually active. I calculated that fifteen years amounted to approximately 782 weeks, or 5,475 days, or 131,400 hours, or 7,884,000 minutes. Of course, these were just rough calculations, but they drove home a cruel fact. I would miss out on 10,950 opportunities to see the sun, a total of 5,475 sunrises and 5,475 sunsets.
Of course, I would miss more than sunrises and sunsets. I would miss the spring, the fields, the grass, the crickets, my chalk, and Ah May’s childhood. If I survived the 5,475 days, Ah May would be a grown woman. She would never again clasp my leg or hang on my arms, experimenting over and over again with various tones and expressions that could go with the title “Uncle”—but no: “Daddy.”
At six every morning, the loudspeaker would sound. After “The East Is Red”—the popular folk song praising Mao Zedong—there would be a series of long and short beeps, then a broadcaster with a firm, simple voice would accurately announce the date and time. I didn’t need to use knots in a rope to count the days like I did while hiding in that dark room, but I couldn’t fully trust the metallic voice, so I still stubbornly tied knots in the rope in my head. These knots were letters from Ah Yan. She wrote to me twice a month without fail. Each letter was a knot. I kept track of the days if I kept track of the letters. One letter was two weeks, two letters was one month, and six letters was one season. When I received the twenty-fourth letter, I knew I had been there an entire year.
Ah Yan’s letters were neither long nor short. They always kept to around two pages, always relating simple facts. For instance, the harvest was good, and the tomatoes had to be eaten that season, though the cucumbers and beans would keep for a whole year if they were pickled. Or, the village committee had been established based on the Chinese Peasants’ Association. The director was Yang Bashu’s son, Yang Baojiu. I noted that Ah Yan used this strangely formal, almost scientific, name instead of the nickname everyone knew him by, Scabby. She wrote about how the primary school in the temple had been reopened after a three-month closure, and a new teacher was sent from the county. This new teacher was an outsider, and he spoke formal Mandarin with poor articulation, so Ah May didn’t understand him. She wrote that my middle school classmate Chen Kaiyi had been appointed minister of the county-level party committee, and that her small medical clinic had changed its name and moved into the village committee compound to become semipublic, and that Yang Jianguo had gotten diphtheria but had been fortunate enough to obtain a costly box of penicillin that both saved him and prevented the illness from spreading to others (though Ah Yan didn’t mention who paid for it). She wrote that Ah May was still learning from my textbook and always asking about new words and giving her headaches, and on and on. She never advised me with words like “reform well” and didn’t ask me about my situation. Her letters were regular domestic trivia, but nothing that was overly cautious, deliberate, faltering, or insincere.
Ah Yan’s letters were simply dry facts. She never added emotion or offered any sort of interpretation or exposition. Her letters were so pure that even the most sensitive hound couldn’t find a suspicious scent, but they were so rich that I could practically smell her fragrance and hear her voice. I read each one over and over, stretching out my antennae like an insect, carefully examining any clue that might exist between these seemingly isolated facts. I came to several conclusions that I thought were solid. First, Scabby had gained power, but Ah Yan still held his heel. Second, things were smooth for Ah Yan and Ah May. And third, Ah May had not forgotten me and was waiting for my return.
Ah Yan’s letters rarely mentioned my mother. I thought the rift that had developed between them over the years must still be there. Later, though, I learned my mother had died of a heart attack three months after my arrest. Something else that made me feel strange was that Ah Yan always addressed the letters to “Yao Zhaohu” instead of “Liu Zhaohu,” and she wrote it in a striking size, larger than appropriate for a name on an envelope. It took some time for me to understand Ah Yan’s outstanding self-taught espionage skills. She’d dissected a huge rescue plan into small parts, scattering them over seemingly unrelated details, waiting for me to figure it out. I was slow and remained so fascinated with the superficial details, I let the most important information pass by right under my nose.
The letters I wrote in reply to Ah Yan were shorter. I didn’t want to tell her that I’d learned to crawl through the narrow coal mine like
a snake. My belly button, nostrils, every strand of hair, and every pore were coated black. If I shook my bedroll, a patch of glittering black dust rose in the room. The phlegm I spat out from my mouth was like mud. This was my daily life. What was there to tell Ah Yan after I’d decided not to mention any of that? All I could do was copy the erroneous character strokes or misused terms from her letter and add corrections or comments as if I were still the fashionable student returning to the village from the county seat, peddling insights I’d gained in the city and classroom with great excitement. When I received the forty-sixth letter from Ah Yan, I found a few awkward, childish strokes at the end of her letter: I finished the book. You didn’t keep your word. Black tears streaked down my cheek.
From then on, every time I received a letter from Ah Yan, I first looked at the end of it. I was eager to find a line of handwriting different from Ah Yan’s, but I didn’t hear the small voice hidden in that strange handwriting again until three years later. It was the one hundred nineteenth letter Ah Yan had written me. At the end of the letter, I found an unfamiliar handwriting. It was still immature writing, but one could see that the foundation had formed. It read, Yao Zhaohu, Yao Zhaohu, you are Yao Zhaohu. Ah Yan had crossed that pencil text out with a fountain pen and written beside it, Ah May is practicing her writing. Examine it closely and let me know what you think. Has she improved? A week later, just after I had descended into the shaft, I was called back up and told someone was there to see me. I was taken to the manager’s office. There were two police officers with the mine manager and secretary in the office. This time, there were no guns on their belts.
