A thread of sky, p.28
A Thread of Sky, page 28
He studied her face, then stubbed out the cigarette. “Let’s take a walk.”
The fog had opened here and there to show starry patches of sky. The air entering her lungs felt so sheer that it seemed the stars should hang nearly within reach, but they looked farther than ever, minute and brilliant. He started up steps that spiraled to the top of a peak. She followed. If she slipped, her whole body could tumble under the railing. Halfway up, her teeth were chattering. The fog had insinuated itself through every layer of clothing, skin, and muscle to her bones.
“I’m freezing.” She sounded like a child.
He took her hand in both of his and briskly rubbed it until the blood coursed. He worked her other hand, her arms, her ears. Wherever he touched her, the other parts were jealous. When he stopped, she nearly cried out in protest. She thought she saw him smirk and she wanted to punch him. What was this feeling, this force befalling her, that seemed to threaten—more than she imagined sex ever could—to make an object, a victim out of her?
She turned away and leaned over the railing. An evergreen thrust itself out of a nook, its top wind-flattened, its gnarled branches all reaching straight out from the face of the cliff. A pine indigenous only to Huangshan, the plaque by its roots said, with its own species name: Pinus huangshanensis.
She gave a tinny laugh. “Look. Pinus huangshanensis. That doesn’t sound very Latin.”
He tucked two fingers under her chin and turned her face back to his. She caught her breath, a loud stupid sound. The scent of smoke on him was acrid and lovely. Her hair was full of mountain wind. Against her back, icy locks and chains. Her arms hung slack as he kissed her, as they kissed. Her heart fluttered, fluttered and strained against her rib cage.
The morning revealed where they stood: an exalted space, another stratum between earth and sky. Overhead, clouds like fish scales dappled the blinding blue. Around them, the fog had become wispy, playful mist. And before them was a scene so unprecedented she didn’t know how to take it in.
A skyline—not of buildings, but countless mountains—not earthy or rolling, but somehow flat, the color of shadow, jagged and stark, rippling and cresting into a sea of clouds. Flat—not really flat, of course, but governed by different laws of perspective, like the scroll mountainscapes sold in every Chinatown and every souvenir shop in China. They’d always looked hokey to her, but they were true: those serrated arcs to these peaks, those curlicues to this mist, those eyelash-fine brushstrokes to these slender dark pines with upticking needles, those reproductions to this splendor.
And now she remembered a vocabulary lesson from the middle of the year: yunhai, sea of clouds. In Chinese, it wasn’t a cliché; it was a word.
Her mother stood beside her, clicking away on her camera.
Humbly, contritely, Kay asked, “How would you describe this?”
Mom murmured, “Your aunt is the poet.”
“But what words come to mind? Are they all Chinese?”
“Kay, just enjoy the view.”
The view was shifting even in that moment, mist rising, peaks vanishing, a spray of pink azalea unveiled, dew on pine needles catching the light.
Byron was there, on the other side of the group, and they hadn’t spoken since they kissed good night, but when she closed her eyes, a single slow blink, she could feel a hum in the air between them.
Tommy began to make noises about the time, but even he seemed loath to leave, and they all dragged their feet, turning again and again for one last look.
The consolation for leaving those mountains: their arrival, at last, in the province of her ancestors, the closest she’d get to her laojia.
On the bus from the Guangzhou airport, seated across the aisle from her grandmother, Kay was stuffing her sweatshirt into her backpack when she found her grandfather’s card crushed at the bottom. It was wet from yesterday’s fog, the paper discolored and wavy, the handwritten characters bleeding. Frantically, she tried to press it straight, blow it dry.
“From who?” Grandma asked. “You have a boyfriend in Beijing?”
Kay hesitated, then handed her the card. Grandma squinted at it and thrust it back, her mouth tight.
Seated behind Kay, Nora snapped to attention. “Grandma, there isn’t much time left.”
Kay ventured, “Did you see his writing? How his hand shakes?”
“What do I care?” Grandma snapped.
“Grandma, he still carries your picture in his wallet,” Nora said.
Kay nodded. “He showed me. He’s still so proud of your revolutionary work.”
“Proud? He doesn’t deserve to be proud.” Creakily, Grandma’s voice scaled.
Nora stammered, “You carry a picture of him, too. I shouldn’t have looked, but I found it in your suitcase.”
“What picture?” Grandma’s chest was heaving.
“The picture of that little boy, in a silver case,” Nora said. “Don’t make a mistake you’ll always regret. Don’t wait until it’s too late.”
Grandma stood up, a haunted look on her face. “Where is he?”
Seated behind her, Mom said, “Ma, sit down. Nora, that’s enough.”
Nora said, “He’s on his way to see you. After all these years—”
“Who do you mean?” Grandma rasped. “How do you know? Where is he?”
Nora looked bewildered. “Grandpa. He’s flying to Hong Kong.”
“I won’t see him,” Grandma shouted. “I’ll get off this bus right now. I’d rather die in the streets than see him again.”
Mom gripped Grandma’s shoulders. “Sit down.”
Grandma shook her off and tottered toward the front of the bus. Mom lunged after her. So did Nora and Aunt Susan, Sophie and Kay herself. Ahead, she saw the driver gaping in the rearview mirror, Tommy’s orange-topped head popping out from the front seat, the startled faces of everyone else in their tour group, and Byron’s eyes, widened, showing the pink corners and copper irises. The driver braked.
Grandma pitched forward. They tried to catch her, but their outstretched hands seemed to inflict further injury rather than cushion her fall.
Mom and Aunt Susan had taken hold of Grandma’s arms. Leading her back to her seat, Mom repeated over and over, as if to a child, “Sit down. Never mind. Suan le. Suan le.”
22
In this city. On these streets. A little boy’s legs—the nibs of bone, the tender flesh—how far could they carry him, how fast?
Through the filmy glass, Lin Yulan tried to search the faces outside, but they all blurred by. Wedged between her own body and the side of the bus, her right arm throbbed, the numbness shading to pain. Numbness was a kind of pain, the nerves crying out how they could.
Fifty-one years ago now. This city, their last stronghold, soon to fall. Their passages to Taiwan narrowly secured, with the last of their savings. Already they were the last of their kind—prominent Nationalists, newly declared enemies of the people—to flee.
Her husband on the stoop, a look on his face like it was being eaten from inside.
Why was he sitting there? Where had she been? Why was he sitting there? The house behind him hushed and dim. Where were the children? Inside—their daughters—inside. Their son? He fell before her on knees and hands, forehead to the ground. Their son had wandered off. He’d gone missing. He was gone. A rally, an alarm, pandemonium, gone. The boy, her boy, her son. He’d searched all night, all day. Where had she been?
What was he saying? Where was her son?
He’d taken the boy on an outing. The boy was inconsolable—crying for her—so he took him along while he tended business—bank accounts, the title to his father’s house. And then—then—a crowded street, a last desperate rally, shouts about Communist agents, a frenzied crush, their hands forced apart. When the commotion subsided, he was gone.
What street? What rally? What gone? A three-year-old couldn’t be gone. Her little boy was somewhere. He—this wretched beast before her—would bring her there. He said he’d already searched all night, all day. She slapped him. She could have stomped on his neck. Kneeling before her, he wept. He’d already searched the neighborhood, every lane, every yard. Now they could only wait, and hope—She slapped him again. He would bring her there.
Before they reached the street, she knew. That day she followed him. The girl who lived there. Wei-wei, who begged to volunteer for her organization, was so inspired by her speeches, so admiring of her husband. Doe-eyed with a fine high nose and, when Lin Yulan last saw her, a defiantly swelling belly. There were many kangzhan furen in those days, wartime wives; spouses having been left behind or sent out, people sought comfort where they could. Unremarkable that Wei-wei was one. The question was whose.
He broke down. He’d brought their son to the house of a friend. Inconsolable—crying for his mother—that was true. He didn’t know where she was. He waited and waited. Finally, thinking a little boy could be pacified by a woman, he brought their son to the house of a friend. A friend, nothing more. Did she remember Wei-wei? She faced him and he went silent, his lips trembling, the color of a corpse.
From their rattling rickshaw, she shouted her little boy’s name into the oblivious gray streets.
She could never reconstruct even the circumstances into which he’d vanished. He’d wandered out of the house—out of the yard. He’d been left alone in the yard. He’d wanted to play outside, to look at the flowers. He wouldn’t stop crying. He’d been left out there how long? Not long. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Maybe half an hour.
Only he, the one who’d lost her little boy, could help her find him. His word, the word of a shameless liar, was the closest she could ever get to the truth.
Was there a rally? Yes, a small, ineffectual one—they’d passed it. The shouts about Communist agents? The tending to business? No—yes. Why hadn’t he left the boy at home? He’d left the other two, why not her son? He’d already said, the boy wouldn’t stop crying, crying for her. Had he wanted the boy to meet his mistress? Had he wanted a cover for a last tryst? Why bother? Why this time? Why her son?
Why any of her children, why any child, but why the one who would go missing? Why her son?
And what was her husband doing while her son vanished? That was the only answerable question, one she did not need to ask.
Wei-wei’s eyes were cowlike with terror; the defiant swell was now a toddler. She bleated about the two boys playing together, the older getting bored of the younger, and wandering off. Lin Yulan commanded her to stand on the street with the toddler—the girl held it close, shrouded in a fringed shawl—while she frantically searched the house. Under the beds and tables. Every closet, cabinet, trunk, imagining him leaping out, or lying crushed inside. In the yard were mops, laundry, litter; an overgrown hedge of hibiscus, obscenely pink. Finally, thinking madly, a thief is a thief, Lin Yulan lifted the fringe of the shawl and saw a calm little creature with shining hair, the blackest black, and ears like her husband’s.
In the falling dusk, in the half-deserted city, no one knew anything. No one had seen or heard. No one in this neighborhood would have recognized her son as hers.
She had one picture of him, taken on his third birthday, framed in a silver case. She tucked it inside a pair of his shorts, blue with a green button, a button she’d sewn to replace the one he’d plucked off, and carried it against her chest, in both arms. At last one old man said yes, he’d seen a little boy like that. Where? She seized his wrist, the aged skin slipping loose from the bone. Where? In Wei-wei’s yard, crying.
That night, the next day and night, the next and the next and the next, she banged on strange doors, searched abandoned lots, screamed down alleys. That street, the streets around it, the streets around those streets, an ever-widening black hole.
The hospital, the orphanage, the monastery. Every police station, against all warnings—no telling who was in charge these days. If she got arrested, she’d put her whole family at risk. She still had two children at home. Two daughters, five and four, capable only of staring with dumb, scared eyes.
Every child was her son in cruel disguise. Every patch of earth could hide a grave, every well could swallow a tiny soul like his with hardly a ripple.
Their ship sailed without them. The borders were closing. Communist troops storming the city any day. They were nearly out of provisions. The price of rice had risen from a satchel, then a sack, and now a wheelbarrow of cash, which would soon be worth more as kindling. Her husband secured berths on another boat out, docking not in Taiwan, but Macau—not even an island, a splinter. Before long, there’d be no escape at all.
She said she didn’t care. He grabbed her and shook her. That day—had she heard?—Communist agents had raided the district chief’s house, found only a cousin and a housekeeper, made them kneel on broken glass, wrapped them in burlap and tried to beat information out of them, then beat them to death. He shook her until her brain rattled inside her skull. Didn’t she know they were next on the list?
He’d left word with every trusted contact. Someone would find their son and keep him safe. Until they returned. A few months, a year at most. Until the Nationalist forces turned back this freak tide. Until their country came back to its senses. That very day, they’d return.
That night, he brought home the calm black-haired creature. Wei-wei would stay, he said, banking on the protection of relatives who’d defected early, willing to take the chance with her own life but not her son’s. He said the son’s father had agreed.
The last part she knew to be true. The rest, she’d never know. He could have snatched the child, snuck him away, pried him out of Wei-wei’s skinny arms. She did not ask. She kept him, this child, conceived when she was nearly due with her missing son. She raised him as her missing son. Upon returning, reclaiming—upon somehow finding him bigger, stronger, safe—it would be a small matter to sort. Many families had chosen to leave children behind—to leave them home—until they could return.
Her daughters gaped. Who’s that? Where’s our little brother? Who’s that?
This is your little brother. Don’t dare ask again. She said it, she screamed it. She threatened them, locked them away from him. She might have thrashed them, or ordered her husband to do it. She’d been capable of anything then.
All she remembered packing was that picture.
By the time they boarded the ship, the city’s distress signals were wailing nonstop. Each wail held her little boy’s cry within.
Her little boy, who loved salt and pronounced his own skin tasty, whose eyes turned down at the corners, who’d crawl beside her and burrow under her arm like a kitten, delicately demanding to be scratched. His restless fingers, tugging at buttons and seams. His pinky toes, always straying off the soles of his sandals. His cool silky earlobes. Cheeks heavy in her cupped hands. His baby hair, like the finest seaweed in bathwater. His tiny bridgeless nose. His low round belly. The rosy bulbs of his toes. His large head, so large that not long before, he’d topple over when she sat him down. His tender little legs.
He could have been picked up by a kind woman, could have saved the life of a barren wife. He could have been apprenticed to monks. Taken as a servant. Crippled and made to beg. He could have been hit by a bus. Trampled by a mob. He could have starved to death. Fallen off a footbridge. Drowned in the Pearl River. He could have been recognized as the son of reactionaries and tortured, carelessly killed. He could have been recognized by someone they knew, someone they could never reach. He could have followed an instinct and found his way home only after they’d fled.
In Macau, with nothing to do, nowhere else to go, she’d wander through the casinos. Fellow refugees would nod and smile—brief eerie smiles. Everyone was haunted, every family maimed in some way.
Hoodlums ruled the streets. Tore off women’s earrings, leaving them shrieking, with bloody bisected earlobes. Snatched at bracelets, ready with a cleaver if the metal or the hand resisted. Grabbed unaccompanied children and held them for ransom: this she heard, the rest she saw. Once, she was buying bread, bread like puffed cardboard, when a man ripped the watch off her wrist. On her way home, a different man trailed her, asking if she wanted to buy her watch back. Knees shaking, she laughed in his face.
As soon as they could, they left for Taiwan. With each move, the chance of ever finding her son—of ever being found—got shredded, then shredded again.
In Taiwan, they braced for an attack from the mainland—an attack that wouldn’t happen only because the Party had more urgent threats, starting with the Americans in Korea, but they had no way of knowing. They waited for annihilation, and waited for reclamation, until waiting was like breathing.
They were among nearly two million displaced and shell-shocked—servicemen, journalists, teachers, doctors, merchants, artists, engineers, ordinary citizens—all scrambling for food, shelter, position on this tiny island. Not to mention the thousands of elected officials who’d stop at nothing to regain a semblance of power—and, to start, tossed native Taiwanese out of the government, suspended all elections, and established a lifelong dictatorship, with the worst cronyism, corruption, and censorship she’d yet known.
The saying among the Taiwanese was that the dogs, the Japanese, had finally left after fifty years, only to be replaced by the pigs—the Nationalists. Well, people who feel they’ve lost everything will be ruthless.
Guangzhou was one of the world’s largest ports, a major industrial center. Now they lived in shacks with no water, no electricity, no windows, no chairs.
There was no cause for her to fight, not when there was no nation, only this regime reincarnated on an island where suspected subversives simply vanished in the night. Lin Yulan unrolled bedding, boiled water, procured food, watched her children. This was survival, not homemaking.
Her husband was a rotted man, infested with guilt like termites, gnawing his sinews and bones. The one who’d rescued her, the one who’d destroyed her, the only one who knew what she’d lost. They came together, nights, seeking consolation, seeking vengeance; clinging to each other, to nothing but tatters. She conceived and aborted, conceived and miscarried—and then never again.
