by Ling Zhang
“The comrades at the top need to verify some details of your situation,” the mine manager said to me, his tone almost warm.
“Do you recognize this paper?” One of the police officers took from his briefcase a piece of paper that had been folded many times and was full of creases. When he spread it out on the desk, I finally saw that it was the marriage contract that I’d signed with the Yao family to help me escape recruitment.
I nodded.
“Is this your fingerprint?” he asked.
I nodded again.
He took out a piece of white paper and an ink pad, asked me to make a new fingerprint, blew it dry, then carefully put the paper away. After that, the two officers left without saying another word. A week later, I was released. They told me that I’d been wrongly taken when I was mistaken for a criminal who had a similar name. Three people had written in with evidence that I wasn’t the same person as the Liu Zhaohu listed on the roster of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, because my official legal name had already been changed to Yao Zhaohu in the spring of 1943. The witnesses were Yao Guiyan, the other party to my contract; Yang Baojiu, the party secretary of Sishiyi Bu; and the writer and witness to the contract, Yang Deshun, the village scribe. The testimony was the last document Yang Deshun produced. Two days later, while eating dinner, he fell from his stool and never got up again.
A letter from the minister for the county party organization, Chen Kaiyi, my former classmate, played an important role in this rescue plan. He provided evidence that I was arrested and imprisoned as a student activist while attending school in the county seat. He confirmed that I’d planned to travel to Yan’an with him, but I was unable to catch up with him because of a change in my family situation.
It wasn’t until after I’d left the coal mine, carrying a bedroll so greasy it shone, that I realized the meaning hidden in the words Ah May had tagged on to the letter.
I couldn’t have imagined that after more than 3,600 missed chances to see the sun, I would finally see it again in such a perfect setting. As soon as I entered Sishiyi Bu, I saw an unfamiliar sunflower forest. My feet said that the land beneath them should be the tea forest that had been blown up when the six planes bearing the emblem of miniature suns had flown to the village more than a decade ago. That was not the sun I had missed. Those six suns were from hell, with a fishy, foul blood oozing from their every pore. I would rather face a million years of depravity in the darkness than ever see those suns again.
At some point in time while I was gone, the abandoned tea fields had been replaced by a sunflower forest. The land had long forgotten the tea trees that had been rooted in its flesh for generations. It embraced the new species with fresh enthusiasm. The new roots roped themselves around the old tangled root system, quickly finding a place to settle. However, on such a beautiful sunny day, who could blame the land for its disloyalty? Even I didn’t miss the tea trees.
The sunflowers were full and solid, each golden face looking like a woman who knows how to flirt, free of bashfulness, turned to look at the sky. Everything was golden that day—the rows of finely scattered clouds on the horizon, the bees buzzing on the open flowers, the butterflies flitting through the forest, and the dew clinging to each leaf. I closed my eyes, imprinting the golden memory on my mind as I breathed in the golden breeze. When I opened my eyes again, I suddenly noticed a figure wearing a golden straw hat in the heart of the sunflower forest. She opened her golden arms and flew toward me. A breathless sound passed through her golden lips, piercing a soft, golden hole in my eardrum.
“Daddy!”
I dropped my rolled-up quilt to the ground, scattering golden dust. I wanted to embrace this golden girl, but I found I couldn’t lift her.
I slowly walked back toward the heart of Sishiyi Bu, then stopped in front of the remains of a wall no higher than my ankle. This wall had once been high and covered with slate-gray tiles. The tiles were now built into chicken coops, firewood sheds, and canopies on various other families’ land. What had happened to the door? Though my memory wasn’t as strong as before, I hadn’t lost it completely. I remembered the wooden door, its black paint peeling off in some spots and its threshold worn by the feet of the seven people who constantly crossed it. Those seven people were my father, mother, brother, sister-in-law, two nephews, and me. Where the stove, dining table, and bed had been, there were now new occupants—branched horsetail, dandelion, green bristlegrass, purple amaranth, and affine cudweed. It is a common mistake to think that humans are the only occupants of this world. Actually, there are thousands of varieties of silent, contending species all around us. They can’t wait for us to vacate our homes. They will move in to occupy the spaces once taken by human bodies as soon as the former masters move out. At this time, it had only been four years and three months since my brother’s family had left home for distant lands.
“Daddy, let’s go home,” I faintly heard a golden voice say in my ear.
“Home?” I asked, confused.
Saying nothing, she took my hand. I realized how weak I was then. I needed a nine-year-old child to lead the way home.
That night, I slept in a strange bed smelling of saponin and sunshine. I didn’t dare to exhale, afraid the soot in my lungs would blacken the bed with each breath. In the middle of the night, a soft body climbed into my bed. With her lips, her hands, and her body, she took this thirty-year-old virgin and transformed him into a man.
“Nothing. I have nothing.”
I was like a child, clinging to that body and weeping. She didn’t try to comfort me. She just let me weep a whole life of tears between her breasts until my tear ducts finally dried up. When I’d finished, she patted me on the back, like she might comfort a child.
“You still . . . have me,” she said.
When I woke up in the morning, I didn’t know where I was. I pulled the bamboo curtain open, and the sun came in with the might of a hundred mad bulls, nearly smashing the walls into a patch of white ruins. I thought about my long-awaited reunion with the sun in the sunflower forest the previous day, but I couldn’t remember if it was real or a dream. I wasn’t used to the sun. In fact, I wasn’t used to the sun or to cleanliness, order, quiet, sleeping sprawled out, or resting. There were two quiet voices outside, as soft as the stirring of bees’ wings. I had to strain to pick up a few words.
“Softly . . .”
“Exhaustion . . .”
“Don’t worry about food . . . enough sleep first . . .”
I crept out of the bed and put on my shoes. My soles felt strange without coal dust or cinder beneath them. I snuck to the entrance of the kitchen and saw the backs of two people in the room. The fire in the stove had gone out, but the porridge continued to bubble over the embers, and one stirred the pot while the other sat reading in the sunlight. The reader wore a scarf over her head, which rustled with every breeze in a green flutter. The reader’s posture was strange, shoulders high and head bent low, as if sniffing each word for its smell. That’s how I’d always sat when I was young. I didn’t know how she’d stolen my posture, like a miniature me sitting on the threshold. I felt something soft and warm like rubber enfold my body, almost making me itch. I didn’t dare move, afraid the slightest touch would break it.
That was when I saw the drawings. They were pictures drawn directly on the wall in crayon, covering all four walls and in some places reaching almost to the ceiling. I could tell the drawings were put together piecemeal, and at each seam, I could see a shift in the colors and drawing style. Those seams only marked divisions of time, though. The scene itself was continuous. I couldn’t see where it ended or began. It was a drawing of the village but also a market, with houses, trees, streets, and people. The people were varied—women crouching to wash clothes, small children playing beside the road with chickens and dogs running behind them, old men leaning against doorways smoking, old women carrying bamboo poles on the road. There were even a few young people around a tub selling salted fish. I could
tell immediately these were child’s drawings. The figures were built from a few geometric shapes, and the details were still in the gestation process. The colors were extremely strange. The sun was green, the fish yellow and blue, and the leaves red, with a few black lines. The smoke from the chimney was half-purple and half-yellow. I looked at the pictures again. In the strange combination of color and light, the figures on the wall suddenly started to bulge and move. I grew a little dizzy. I didn’t know if the wall was moving or I was, but I let out a little cry of astonishment.
The person in front of the stove turned around. As soon as she saw me, she asked, blushing slightly, “Are you hungry?”
I nodded. Pointing at the pictures, I asked, “Did Ah May draw this?”
The person sitting on the threshold turned back and snorted. She said, “That’s baby stuff. I don’t do that anymore.”
Ah Yan laughed and said, “Yang Jianguo drew them.”
I said, “Aren’t there walls in his house? Why does he draw here? Aren’t they living in the landlord Yang’s main house now?”
Ah Yan turned to the stove, sighed, and said, “Remember his mother, the one with one eye? Last year during the Spring Festival, the village kids played a prank on her, putting a firecracker in her arms, and it scared her out of her wits. She can’t care for her son anymore. Yang Jianguo comes here every day to play with Ah May. He draws here. I can’t bear to clean it off. I like it.”
Ah May snorted again and said, “I didn’t want to play with that little kid. I was teaching him to read.”
“Who would’ve thought Scabby would have such a son. Maybe he’ll get his big break one day,” I said.
I had a strangely accurate view on this matter. Yang Jianguo did in fact become a famous painter later. But no, by his time, painters weren’t called painters anymore. They were called artists. Two of his paintings were placed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where they were visited by people from all over the world. Of course, that was a long time later, long after I already lay in a grave on that hillside.
Ah Yan glanced at me and said, “Don’t call him Scabby in front of the others. Everybody calls him Party Secretary now.”
I snorted. “When he grows hair on that bald, scabby head, I’ll stop calling him Scabby.”
The reader burst out laughing and said, “Even if he grows hair, he’ll still have scabs.”
Ah Yan glared at her and said, “Don’t get me into trouble. You only got out of trouble this time because of his seal on that paper. If something happens again, how could I save you?”
I knew she said that for my benefit.
There was something I wanted to ask. It bubbled in my belly, but I couldn’t get it out. At least, I couldn’t say it while someone sat on the threshold, listening.
That something was, “What did you have to do to save me this time?”
The shoes were Liberation brand sport shoes, but he was certainly not the first owner. The shoes were two sizes too big, and I could almost see his toes dancing in the empty space in front. It’s hard to explain his pants. The fabric may have been gray when they were new, but other colors had gotten mixed in during the washing process. Now, they were some combination of gray, green, and blue. They weren’t the style of baggy trousers with a long waist and narrow cuffs normally worn by the villagers, but were the same width all the way down, with a pleat on the front. If the pants were his, they certainly weren’t from the village tailor. He would’ve had to travel at least as far as the county seat to find a tailor familiar with this fashion. I didn’t recognize his shirt either. It couldn’t have been made by a tailor, so it must’ve been a uniform given out by the state. It had a stiff collar that stood straight up and four pockets. The pocket on the left had a flap that, when lifted, revealed a slot with a fountain pen in it. His hat matched the shirt, the color faded to almost exactly the same degree. It was obvious they used to belong to the same owner and had been washed in the same basin by the same hands.
When he stood in the doorway of my house—if I can call Ah Yan’s house my house—he hesitated, as if unsure which foot to lift over the threshold first. In that moment of hesitation, I had already inspected him from head to toe—no, actually, from toe to head. Anyway, whichever direction, I had sized him up carefully. In the end, he decided to cross the threshold with his left foot. When his right foot followed suit, he shouted his question toward the house, as if announcing himself.
“Yang Jianguo, you rotten child, is your butt a millstone? Once you’re here, you sit all day. Don’t you ever come home?”
The boy sitting at the table writing dropped his pencil and slid down like a loach, avoiding the hand reaching for his ear. The air stirred up by the arrival quickly grew still. With her eyes, Ah Yan urged me to pull a stool out for the guest.
“Just talking about coming to thank you, after getting a little rest,” she said to the guest.
I knew the subject omitted from her sentence was me.
He sat and took off his hat. His face hadn’t changed much, but his head had. He had even less hair, and the spots that had earned him the nickname Scabby now unscrupulously occupied the area vacated by his hair. His eyes kept pecking at me here and there, like a bug striking against a window.
“You didn’t get beaten, did you? You look all right,” he said, dragging out the question. I saw his toes wiggle with excitement in his shoes.
“I survived,” I said.
He searched through his pockets, left to right, top to bottom, and finally found a box of Labor brand cigarettes. He then began another search, this time from right to left and bottom to top, but he didn’t find what he was looking for. Ah Yan tore a bit from a page of Ah May’s old workbook and twisted it into a thin roll. She reached into the dying fire in the stove, lit it, and passed it to him. The cigarette flared up, then dimmed, then brightened again before it lit properly. A flattened circle of smoke slowly squeezed out from his lips as he sucked hard on the cigarette.
“You’re lucky. You muddled through. Still, your secret is like a fire bug hidden in a paper lantern. Just a gentle jab will expose the light,” he said.
My eyelids twitched. Ah Yan gave me a sidelong glance, a meaningful and heavy glance, sealing my lips shut before I could open them.
“If somebody jabbed at the lantern, no one would be spared. You stamped the seal. You’d be doubly guilty. Just for the seal, they’d kill you twice,” Ah Yan said.
Ah Yan spoke in the calm, familiar tone, no ripple or wrinkle of emotion. His toes trembled, then stopped dancing.
“Doesn’t matter who gets shot. We’ll all be in trouble, so it’s best not to make trouble.” He finished his cigarette, then tossed the butt to the ground. He snuffed it out with his foot, then rose halfway from his chair, as if unsure whether or not to go.
Ah Yan nudged Ah May, who sat at the table, writing. “Go pack up Yang Jianguo’s schoolbag so his dad can take it home with him,” she said.
He had to get up then.
“I need a stamp,” Ah Yan said. “I’m going to the pharmacy in town to buy tetracycline. The clinic is out of medicine.”
He cleared his throat and said, “May as well leave the stamp in your pocket. You use it most.” Then, he lumbered out the door.
Ah Yan hurried after him. Standing in the doorway, she called to him, “Can you let the leaders know my husband Zhaohu needs to go back to the school and teach. There are many children, so it’s good to have two teachers. And anyway, it was his position.”
The fellow stopped and called back, “I’m not in charge of that. It’s up to the leaders.”
Ah Yan laughed coldly and said, “Who are you kidding? Your boy Jianguo’s been eating at my house for years. Have I asked you for a bucket of rice? Or a bundle of sticks? Do you want me to break down all the expenses?”
He didn’t answer, his Liberation shoes grinding the stones on the road as he lumbered into the distance.
Ah Yan came back to the house and sat on the
threshold. She didn’t say anything. She knew anything she said might start a fight. She waited for me to find an outlet for the anger boiling up inside me.
“Son of a bitch,” I suddenly spat out.
Ah Yan was startled. It took a while for her to recognize that it was English. She hadn’t heard anyone speak English in ten years.
“Baldy,” she replied after a while, also in English.
As if we had planned it, we both leaned on our knees, overcome with laughter. Ah May looked at us in surprise and asked, “What devilish language is that?”
I wanted to explain, but neither my mouth nor my body would do what I told it to. Whenever my eyes met Ah Yan’s, we laughed as if we were crazy.
That was when the idea of teaching Ah May English was born. At first, I just wanted a secret language for the three of us. Then, we wouldn’t need to be afraid of cracks in the walls, window frames, and ceilings, or ears that sprouted tongues and eyes that sprouted teeth. But eventually, I found that Ah May was drawn to the language, and what was first a tool became the finished product, and the path became the goal. At a time when everyone was crazy to learn Russian, Ah May quietly studied English under the pretense of learning Russian. By the time she entered middle school, she no longer needed the Russian cover. The situation had changed, and Russian was banished into the ice fortress. In the newly established English class, she was immediately chosen as class head, because while her peers were still torturing their brains to memorize the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, she could already carry on a short conversation with her teacher.
