Bad Bad Girl, page 10
What a relief that there were no parents around to judge her worthy or unworthy of their son. Distraught as she was about what was happening to their families, there was that consolation. From the Pings, she might have earned a big red X—wrong!—as she had from her mother, and who knew but that she might have received the same from the Jens. From Chao-pe, though, she seemed to be earning an A. He was impressed that she had started a typing business—how practical and capable she was! Was it lying not to tell him that her parents had stopped sending her money and that she thought her mother was behind it? Was it wrong not to tell him that she feared her problem was her own fault, having spent too much money in Chicago? (Although she had had to, she really had; it wasn’t as though she had spent money like water, it really wasn’t.) Should she have told him that she would do anything not to have to make money—that she was not so much practical and capable as desperate, and lucky to have met Marnie Mulligan? And that she especially hated typing for Georgiana—should she have told him that?—that she hated the way Georgiana looked over the pages, judging them?
In fact, there was no one else who could correct Georgiana’s Chinglish the way my mother did. Georgiana was dependent upon my mother. Still, she would look over the pages with a critical air, making my mother stand there, awaiting her approval, like a servant. Once she made my mother type a page over. But usually she would finally say, “Very good,” open her purse, and take out some bills. And for her part, my mother would not count them as Georgiana handed them over, even though Georgiana had shorted her once. Indeed, she would not so much as take the bills in her hand.
“You can leave them on the table,” she would say instead.
“If you would like more clients, I know some people at other schools,” offered Georgiana one day.
“I don’t need their business,” my mother replied proudly. Actually, she could have used more business. But now she told Chao-pe that she was turning people away.
“There are interested people at other colleges,” she said. “I don’t even want to talk to them, though.”
“Don’t even want to talk to them?” Chao-pe was impressed. “Mister!” he said—“mister” being one of his favorite expressions, picked up from American engineers.
* * *
—
He told her all about himself—starting with the fact that he was, like her, well-heeled. Though his father had died young, his grandfather was like a local prince. He owned a great deal of land, thirteen small banks, and a string of stores that sold everyday necessities. He had built a family compound with hundreds of rooms and paved the town roads besides; the first electric light in the district was in his bedroom. Chao-pe remembered the day the light was switched on—how he and his brothers had heard the grown-ups saying over and over, dî, dî—but what was “dî”? At first he had thought that maybe it was a kind of fish, but his older brother said it was a kind of light. How could it be a kind of light? He saw a long string being strung up—a special string, not a regular string—and then suddenly there it was. He and his brothers were sitting on bamboo stools, playing with crickets, when a new star appeared, brighter and lower than any star they had ever seen before—a star that appeared caught in their grandfather’s bedroom. How could it be? Their grandfather had captured a star from the sky! He had hung it from his ceiling!
Chao-pe remembered, too, the way his grandfather had brought up Chao-pe’s uncles, exposing them to everything. He would bring them in a private train car to Shanghai, for example, where they would eat Western food using knives and forks, even as they brought along thermoses of Chinese tea with which to wash the strange food down. How primitive foreigners were, that they could eat such food, the uncles agreed. Were not raw vegetables more fit for pigs than people? And yet foreigners were responsible for that electric light and more. So even though Chao-pe’s uncles laughed at foreign food, they practiced their English. They wore Western-style suits with felt fedoras, too, except when it was time to pay respects to Chao-pe’s grandfather. Then they would all, quick, change into Chinese gowns.
Chao-pe’s grandfather, meanwhile, quick, changed people’s lives all the time. Chao-pe’s most vivid memory was of how as a child he had been slated to be given away to a relative with no son, this being a common practice at the time: families needed males to carry on their line, after all, and why would someone like Chao-pe’s mother need five boys? Five boys were a lot for a widow to handle. Did it not make sense for her to give one to the heirless relative? Maybe the fourth son? So the uncles figured, and off Chao-pe would have gone had his grandfather not asked for one last look at him.
Since his grandfather was in Shanghai at the time, Chao-pe’s mother had to bring him into the city. He was four years old and had never seen anything as big as the train—so much, much bigger than a water buffalo, and so much louder and stronger, too! A train was like a metal dragon, belching fire clouds. And the city! In Yixing, his family compound was the grandest edifice in town. But nothing in the entire complex could compare with the buildings of Shanghai. These were mountain buildings, with cavernous rooms, one after the next; and what a shock to find that inside one of the caverns, in a big carved chair at a big carved desk, sat his grandfather. Servants waved a fly from his head as he looked down at Chao-pe; they fanned him. He smiled. Stern as he could be with grown-ups, he was gentle with children.
“You are very smart,” he said, after a moment. “I can see it.”
“I am!” said Chao-pe.
People laughed.
“He looks like his father,” said someone—not his mother, someone else. (His mother did not dare say anything, it seemed.)
“I look just like him!” Chao-pe agreed.
Everyone laughed again as his grandfather nodded. A corner of his mouth pulled to the side in amusement.
“I’ve changed my mind. I am going to keep him,” he said. “Such a fine boy.”
And with that, Chao-pe’s mother swept him back up into her arms. He wasn’t going to live with the relative—he was staying home, to live with her and his brothers! It was the happiest moment of Chao-pe’s life, and what could make more sense than for him and his mother to find, as they left the big stone building, that lights like the nine sons of the dragon king had been turned on. His mother, as amazed as he was, asked what they were called. Níhóng dēng, someone told her—neon lights.
“We saw neon lights!” Chao-pe told everyone when they got home. “Neon lights! They are brighter than the sun!”
He really was a country bumpkin, comments my mother now.
Above all, his grandfather taught the men in the family to fear nothing, which proved good preparation for the War Against the Japanese. Chao-pe by then was in college. While my mother’s school struggled on in besieged Shanghai, his university moved inland to Chongqing with the government, to try to escape the bombing. It was the university president who had made the decision to relocate; Chao-pe admired him for it.
That journey through the Yangtze River gorges, though! The current was so strong that even with a motor, the boats were not moving and needed the help of the many towmen working the river. The long lines of harnessed men and their ancient system of ropes and rock-anchored fulcrums were something to see—mister!—the very sort of manpower that had built the Great Wall but that, if Chao-pe and his classmates could only get their training, was hopefully going to be obsolete one day. In the meanwhile, the towmen bent over, sweating and straining, pulling along the hot cliff paths while onboard, polemen pushed, their bamboo poles arced to the snapping point.
The boat did not move.
The men tried again, heaving with all their strength.
Nothing.
They tried again and again until finally the university president made another tough decision: to throw the lab equipment overboard. Chao-pe could not believe it even as he helped—they all helped—first to move things to the deck, then to heave them up over the railings into the water. What a splash! They started with the heaviest equipment, but in the end, it all went in the water—pumps, compressors, engines, heaters, coolers, tanks—no doubt making the river trip more hazardous for any boats that followed them, but they could not think of that now. They had no choice; it was hard enough to see such valuable machinery in the water, complete with all the gauges and dials over which they had once hovered, watching for even the slightest change. How were they going to do research without their measurements?
The towmen and polemen tried again. Again. Again. Once more! the president ordered. They tried yet again.
The books—they were going to have to dump the books. To load the boat in Nanjing, the students had organized a kind of brigade line, with each person handing a box of books to the next. Now they did it again, except that the last person in line did not carefully stack the box on top of the others but instead dumped it in the water. Over and over the railing they went, box after box after box of textbooks on math, physics, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering. The president watched, his face grim, but at least the towmen, their backs shining with sweat and their legs all but parallel to the ground, were finally able to gain some purchase. What a price—but they were, they were moving! Everyone rejoiced. There were hours of poling and towing ahead. Still, they were moving, first slowly, then faster, until they’d made it! They’d made it through the gorges! They were on their way to Chongqing!
If only they did not finally reach Chongqing only to discover that the Japanese were bombing there, too. Thank heavens for the mountain caves in which the school could set up classrooms and dorms. The caves were at least relatively safe and also blessedly cool, as everyone appreciated: there was a reason Chongqing was called one of the furnaces of China. Lighting the caves was not easy; many people would huddle around a single lightbulb to study. And water had to be ferried up from the river below—something boys immediately began doing for girls they liked. Sometimes the girls knew who their pail was from; sometimes they didn’t. They excitedly discussed the possibilities even as bombs exploded outside.
“Once I hid from a plane under the lotus leaves of a pond—a plane that went on to bomb a mountain cave in which classes were being held,” Chao-pe said. “That bomb set off a landslide, in which many people were killed—many, many people. There was a big funeral. Everyone was crying. But people were crying for me, too, not realizing that I was late to class because I had gotten stuck in the mud under the lotus leaves. So when I walked into the funeral, everyone stopped in shock. Then they all began clapping.”
And, like them, listening now, my mother clapped, too. So many stories! Chao-pe knew how to take her mind off the revolution.
“We will all go back one day,” said Chao-pe. “Maybe some people do not like the way things are. Maybe some people feel things are unfair. But no one wants the government to own everything. The way the Communists think is fundamentally wrong.”
So he figured.
But the Communists soon passed an Agrarian Reform Law so radical that he and my mother would not have believed it had they not heard it read aloud in the Dodge Room.
“Article 1. The land ownership system of feudal exploitation by the landlord class shall be abolished and a system of peasant land ownership shall be introduced in order to unleash rural productive forces, develop agricultural production, and pave the way for China’s industrialization,” their friend began. He held the paper with his fingertips as he read, his pinkies outstretched as if to distance themselves from the words. “Article 2,” he went on, and “Article 3,” then “Article 4,” until finally he ended with, “Article 10. All land and other means of production thus confiscated and requisitioned…shall be taken over by the peasants’ council for unified, equitable, and rational distribution to poverty-stricken peasants who have little or no land and who lack other means of production. Landlords shall be given an equal share so that they can make their living by their own labor and thus reform themselves.”
People stood, silent. In another room, a harp was being played. Arpeggios; a lingering last note; a pause. The faraway audience clapped.
“Why do they bother to call this a law?” said someone finally. “Why do they pretend there is something legal about it when it is theft, pure and simple?”
And what did it mean for families like Chao-pe’s? Articles 2 and 4 suggested that the Jen compound was safe—their banks and shops, too.
But few people in the room were reassured.
“Safe for now, you mean,” said someone.
As for families like the Jens making their living through labor, it was inconceivable. Labor? How could they do labor? With their government ties, Chao-pe thought that at least two of his brothers had gotten out, as well as, he fervently hoped, his mother. But what about his other two brothers and all his many relatives?
“You realize that the Communists have only just begun,” said someone. “There is more to come.”
“ ‘Other shoes to drop,’ as the Americans say.”
“It’s like what happened in Russia.”
“They are worse than the Japanese.”
“Our poor families.”
“Our poor families.”
“Our poor, poor families.”
From somewhere came the clack of chairs being folded up and put back.
Did you know how bad it was? I ask now.
How could we know? my mother says.
Scholars today say a million people died in that reform alone. And it was just the start.
She is quiet.
Rumors were circulating wildly—about houses being requisitioned, with their owners given twenty-four hours to leave. About people being tried by their employees, even as others left town with diamond-stuffed hams.
“Hams!” said someone.
“House requisitions,” said someone else. “They’re just like the Japanese.”
“The Communists may be peasants, but they don’t want to live like peasants, it seems.”
“Does anyone?”
People laughed choked laughs.
* * *
—
A friend with relatives in Taiwan had good and bad news for Chao-pe. The good news: not two but three of his brothers had indeed gotten out, along with their children and, yes, his mother! The bad news: one of his brothers had been left behind, as well as many relatives, and the family compound had been, predictably, requisitioned. As for what exactly that meant, who knew? Were people simply turned out? Were they given a chance to pack? Were the servants turned out, too? And did the servants help defend family members, or did they turn on them? Sometimes even irrepressible Chao-pe sat staring into space. Neither he nor my mother could sleep; neither he nor my mother could concentrate.
He focused on teaching my mother how to cook. She had learned to boil water and make coffee and tea from the Pings, but neither she nor her roommates knew much more. They all generally ate out; she complained it was making her fat. While living in the mountains in Chongqing, meanwhile, Chao-pe and his classmates had figured out not only how to cook but how to cook in their cave-classrooms, using stoves they had fashioned themselves out of scrap metal.
“One-to-one,” he told her. “You can use a cup, a bowl, anything. Just one measure of water to one measure of rice. Then you bring it to a boil. When it’s boiling, you turn it down and cover it.”
Amazing! Upset as she was about everything, my mother could not help but wonder at him. How did he know such things? He brought her to the grocery store.
“The white meat is chicken,” he said. “The pink meat is pork. And the red meat—that is beef. Someday we will be able to afford it. Right now we can only eat eggs, pork, and chicken. They should all be kept in the icebox.”
Raw meat! How disgusting! It was weeks before she could bring herself to touch it. But having mastered both rice and hard-boiled eggs, she finally one day just did it. She bought a piece of pork and cut it up with a knife, slicing it against the grain, just as Chao-pe had shown her. Then she added cornstarch and sherry and soy sauce. (Chao-pe mixed the little mountain with his hands, but she used chopsticks.) She put it in the icebox and, as a surprise, presented the bowl of meat to him when he came to visit.
“Good work, Chef Loo!” he exclaimed. He showed her how to heat oil in a pan and stir-fry the meat until it was done. Then they had their first meal outside of a restaurant—stir-fried pork and rice.
“You know everything,” she said.
“How can you say that? You don’t know what I know.”
“I know.”
Still he insisted that she did not know and, what’s more, that she did not even know what she did not know. Then he showed her some other things he knew she did not know, and he was right. She had not even known that she did not know them, though her body seemed to know them; it was as if he and her body were secretly in league. As for what else she did not know, she knew enough to know that she did not want to know whatever it was until they were married.
“Let’s get married, then,” he said.
“You know, my mother used to say no one would ever marry me,” she said.
It was not something she had meant to tell him—or anyone, really. She had learned her lesson early, with Nai-ma—how she wished she had never asked, Was she fired again? And how many times had her father told her—told all the children—to watch their tongues? “Westerners have a saying, ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ ” he said. “It is a bit like our ‘Just as illness comes in through a mouth, trouble comes out through a mouth.’ The lesson is the same.” But she couldn’t help herself. Maybe it was a kind of test—to see if it made Chao-pe think twice about her. To see if some part of him could see why no one would ever marry her.
