Where Waters Meet, page 15
Nix (on tenterhooks)
* Email attachment: Phoenix’s manuscript Sisters
1.
What a change! The trace of shock in each other’s eyes triggered a covert cry from both of them in silent unison.
It was September 1949, four months after the Communist takeover of Shanghai.
When they parted in the fall of 1944, Chunyu (Rain, as she would later come to be known) was sixteen, and Mei, a year and a half older. The whirlwind of events had left them with patchy and disjointed memories and derailed them from their normal tracks of life. They hadn’t had the mind, at their hasty departure, to entertain the idea that there was still a lot of growing up ahead of them, in a biological sense if nothing else.
They had been through long journeys of life to get to this point: Chunyu a nurse’s aide at a military hospital in a town not far from their home, and Mei, freshly demobilized from the Communist New Fourth Army, now a local government official in Shanghai.
Growing up was something that had just happened to them, catching them unawares and inattentive. Five years and two wars later—the Anti-Japanese War and the civil war—face to face at the train station in Shanghai, they were stunned to recognize the fruit of the growing process in each other.
They were both a good half a head, if not more, taller. Chunyu had a sick, almost anemic, pallor to her face. The straight, steady gaze that had made many a heart jitter was gone from her eyes, replaced by a tiny, timid flutter of uncertainty, like a frightened animal. Her feet, having been confined for the last five years to the narrow dirt path between her dorm and the hospital wards, reminded her that she was in unfamiliar territory, somebody else’s world. Oh God, no—Shanghai was a different universe altogether.
She remained in a mental haze for days before eventually simmering down, easing herself into the right frame of mind to scrutinize the life Mei had invited her to share.
Of the two, Mei was the one who had changed more. The storm of war had swept over her face, sanding off the pale, tender, moistened, and southern smoothness, leaving a raw surface that was bronzed, coarse, wind cracked, and glowing with passion and purpose. Her braids gone, she now wore her hair short, boyish short, to match her army uniform with its patched elbows, every wrinkle crisp. A belt, a canteen over her shoulder, and a white towel tied to the strap of it—the typical image of a soldier, despite the freshly removed insignia. A combination of female delicacy and muscular power, a perfect morphadite.
It was a style that Shanghai, the epitome of sophistication, hadn’t seen before and didn’t know yet how to react to. Enigmatic and alluring to Chunyu, nonetheless.
“Four months, only four months ago, we took the city when no one thought we could. The first night our soldiers got into Shanghai, a hundred thousand of them all slept in the open, in the rain, not a sound made! The first of the locals to open their doors in the morning found entire streets covered with our boys, fast asleep, wet, snoring—just imagine the shock! Nobody, not even one soldier, tried to get into the residences, even to pee. We won their hearts over in an instant!”
Mei’s Mandarin had also gone through a revolution: the thick local accent, her birthmark, was largely gone, replaced with a smooth, near-perfect Peking tone, carrying, in passing, a slight r sound at the end of nouns.
Accompanying the change in her accent was a reformation of her diction. The princessly I and my, Chunyu had noticed, were usurped by the common band of we and our. In Chunyu’s mind, there echoed Mei’s girlish voice from before the catastrophic events that had derailed her course of life: I am the first to finish the quiz in class today; it’s my calligraphy that got picked for the exhibition; I’ve decided to become an artist, when the war is over; I think Hsu Chih-mo the absolute best poet of the Crescent Moon School . . . The theatrical assertion of self-importance and self-opinion, the trademark of Mei’s adolescence, was now beveled by an unconscious yet proud identification with a faceless multitude.
Cascade of fresh impressions, inundating and overpowering. Chunyu wondered whether she had, in confusion, imagined a different past of a different sister. She eyed Mei with the beginning of envy. You scare them: you’ve got that fire on top of your head, fire of life, bright as hell. The face of Kiyo, the Japanese woman who came into her life five years ago, barged into her mind out of nowhere; it’s what Kiyo used to say about Chunyu. You’ve got that fire on top of your head. And of all the people in the universe, why did it have to be Kiyo who discovered that mind-boggling truth about her? Where was her flame now? Why wasn’t it burning five years later?
Where was Kiyo anyway? Was she dead in a land not her own, with the gold earrings Chunyu gifted her? Or was Kiyo still alive, back in Japan, managing another “household,” as she liked to call it, supplying the goods this time around to the defeated, the war trash?
Chunyu shuddered. They had never been far away in her consciousness, Kiyo and the rest, a capricious presence lurking in the memory grotto, leaping up at her in the most inconvenient moments when she was least alert.
Was she the only one haunted by them? There was no shadow in Mei’s eyes. Mei’s memory grotto—everybody has one—must be safeguarding something entirely different. Victory, conquest, sleeping in the rain while dreaming about a starry sky?
She’s stolen my fire, that’s why she has no trace of fear. Chunyu brooded in silence. A wave of bitterness surged up despite herself and beyond all reason. In the five years that she hadn’t heard from Mei and imagined the worst, Mei was out there gallivanting, seeing the wild, wild world, winning two wars, and gaining a man on the side. The tide had turned, and now it was Mei who was calling the shots.
Mei’s Mandarin suddenly sounded harsh and jarring, pushing Chunyu to the very edge of eruption. She felt a wrenching urge (which she soon came to regret) to ask Mei to switch back to their dialect, the tongue they had used for girlie chats and secret little battles for parental favor. Can one outgrow the language of birth, simply casting it aside like a pair of shoes that no longer fit?
Chunyu didn’t know then that Mei would come back to their shared tongue one day, when life’s cycle brought her closer to where she had started out. But that would happen later. Much later.
They shuffled out of the train station, merging into a boisterous crowd. A squeaky honk from a rickshaw passing made Chunyu jump. There was a white man in a hat and suit peering out from under its cover waving at her, muttering something vague, maybe a good morning, maybe a guten Morgen, she couldn’t quite make out. The driver cut through the traffic with such savage impatience that one of the wheels nearly ran over her foot.
A left turn removed them from the crowd, ushering them into a much wider and quieter street flanked by sycamore trees with mottled trunks, whose tall, strong branches were pruned to embrace each other across the road, forming an arched canopy. Leaves were losing their green to the crisp breeze of fall, turning yellow and brown against the pale blue of the sun-bleached sky, wretchedly vivacious.
Later Chunyu would come to know that a street like this, in a city like Shanghai, was called by a different name. Boulevard, an alien word.
Several women, obviously of the leisure class, brushed past them, all dressed in silk cheongsam, a style Chunyu had never seen before with her dismally limited exposure to the world of fashion. The side slit was cut so high that she could almost see the edge of their panties. She looked away, feeling the heat rising to her face. In the corner of her vision, Mei walked straight ahead, perfectly calm, perfectly natural, indifferent and undistracted.
There were only so many first times that could be stuffed into one day. Chunyu’s head was overstocked, swelling and spinning, her cloth shoes hopelessly tight.
“When we get home, you probably won’t meet Comrade Chen right away. He is so busy, a thousand loose ends to sort out. The world is watching and waiting for us to fail. They don’t believe we can run the city, just like they didn’t believe we could win the war. But we did, didn’t we?”
Comrade Chen was Mei’s husband. They had met four years ago in a military training academy, she a literacy teacher, he the Party secretary. It was her first marriage and his fourth.
His first wife had been a child bride, a free helping hand around the house, forced upon him by his parents when he was seventeen. He left his home village in Shandong three years later, walking barefoot for two days, to join the Communist forces active in the northern mountainous region, turning his back, for good, on his loveless marriage, a two-year-old son, and the bottomless pit of a poor peasant’s life. The next two wives were his own choice, his comrades, companions of love, as one might say, but both died during the war, one from a miscarriage and the other typhoid.
Chunyu listened to Mei talking about her husband, trying hard to silently unravel the mystery of Comrade Chen’s job that could, apparently, cause a stir in the world. Curious as she was, she didn’t dare to pry. She hated to sound more ignorant than she had already made herself out to be. It suddenly hit her, sharp and hard, that the real change in Mei had little to do with her growth spurt, her different skin texture, her modern haircut, or her altered accent. The earth-shattering change had taken place in Mei’s heart. The place where Mei had once stored poetry, writing brushes, and attention-seeking tactics had been emptied out, yielding space for something much bigger than herself.
How much can a heart grow in five years?
“Once you settle in, we’ll get you a job. This is a new Shanghai, no longer a haven for opportunists and parasites. Everybody has to work to earn a living, and contribute to the society,” declared Mei, loud and resonating, pushing back a strand of hair displaced by the wind.
Mei had been recently assigned to work in the office of a major school district and was soon to be appointed its Party secretary, in charge of training the staff for the transition to the new educational system. A podium, a crowd—that was what Mei was born for. The words out of her mouth fell naturally into the form of a lecture or pep talk. Mei’s poetry readings at Father’s birthday parties when she was a child, and the fantasy stories she had told their half sisters with such verve, had all been, in retrospect, perfect preparation for the role she was playing now.
But who would have imagined that it would take two gory wars for Mei to get here? The time had finally come for her to capture a real audience with a real interest in what she had to say.
Chunyu sighed, torn between admiration and misery. A sister lost and a sister found, but she wasn’t sure the one she recovered was the one she had lost.
She had been waiting for Mei to mention their hometown, East Creek. Shortly after Mei broke the five-year-long silence and called her sister out of the blue at the hospital, Chunyu wrote her a letter explaining the story she had fed Father and their half sisters about Mei and Chunyu’s disappearance, a story she hoped Mei would corroborate and repeat.
Mei wrote back three weeks later, telling her of a potential plan to visit Father sometime before the year was out, as there was “too much going on” right now. But Mei didn’t make any reference to Chunyu’s story about their disappearance. It was insignificant, irrelevant, and microscopically trivial compared with the great course of events that were currently unfolding, on which Mei was hoping to leave her very own fingerprints.
Mei had since steered clear of the topic. The conversation between them dried up.
2.
Was Comrade Chen’s existence a myth, like one of the tales Mei used to spin from her unbridled imagination to impress their half sisters? This incredible thought ambushed Chunyu one night as she lay awake.
In the first few days after her arrival in Shanghai, Chunyu didn’t see Comrade Chen around the house. He wasn’t home when she went to bed and wasn’t around for breakfast when she got up in the morning. She didn’t know when—or whether—he got home at all.
“He’s been really busy lately, held up in long meetings. The big heads from Peking are here.”
“He’s taken a trip to Chongming Island, to meet with the local cadres.”
“He’s signed up for a course in the history of Shanghai workers’ movements.”
Chunyu’s curious glances at the empty seat at the dinner table invariably prompted an explanation from her sister. Comrade Chen lived in Mei’s words.
However, there was circumstantial evidence pointing to his existence. One morning Chunyu found two cigarette butts in the kitchen sink. Another time, she spotted men’s clothing mingled with Mei’s in the laundry basin as the housemaid, provided by the Party, was doing the washing.
She heard of him often, and saw of him sometimes.
His full name was Chen Tiansheng, or Chen Tianchen—she wasn’t quite sure of the exact characters as Mei only mentioned it once in passing. He was always Comrade Chen around the house, and became Director Chen over the telephone when Mei or the maid picked up the line. Director of the Industry and Commerce Bureau in the municipal government, a pivotal department according to Mei, to keep the wheels of the city, and to some extent, the country, rolling.
“Does he know enough about commerce, you think?” Chunyu asked Mei innocently, remembering his background as a farmer boy and then a soldier.
Mei looked at her as if stung by a bee.
“So, you are one of them too,” she said coldly.
“What?” Chunyu was puzzled.
“You don’t believe we can run the country.”
Chunyu immediately realized her mistake. There are things in the world that can’t be questioned, a victor’s confidence, for example, and a wife’s pride. Mei was much more Mrs. Chen than Yuan Mei now.
The safest way is for each of you to marry into a different Party, so when things get messy, one can watch over the other.
Mother’s wish, a parting gift of wisdom from a woman who had, or thought she had, got the rules of the world figured out, had been partially fulfilled through Mei, her favorite daughter. Mei, the prettier and more quick-witted of the two, had chosen the right Party to give herself to. In Comrade Chen, Mei had found a steel roof that could withstand any rainstorm. Mother would be pleased with herself and proud of Mei in heaven—if there was such a thing—for the right half of her wish materialized and the wrong half, the alliance with the Nationalist Party, dodged.
What a wise gambler Mother had been, by placing a well-calculated bet in the game of man against fate on the most secure spot: the sibling connection. Blood is always thicker than water.
Isn’t it?
Chunyu’s new life in Shanghai came with a bombardment of new vocabulary that Mei introduced daily, tossing Chunyu into a perpetually confusing, and almost infantile, cycle of learning, retaining, relapsing, and relearning.
“A domestic assistant, a comrade, that’s what she is,” Mei repeatedly corrected her sister, more sternly each time, whenever Chunyu slipped into the term housemaid. “Only the bourgeoisie class has maids. She is assigned here to help Comrade Chen with his work, as simple as that. In this new society, we are all equals working towards the same goal. What better word to use than comrade?”
Did any of the words she learned in school have the same meanings? Chunyu wondered. She felt, with a crushing despair, that she was shrinking, intellectually, back to a grade school girl, lost in words elusive and specious. Memory could no longer be trusted; neither could experience. There existed a shimmering hostility between present and past, the boundary of which was increasingly volatile, as every new day was eagerly pushed into a new past in the spirit of a general negation of anything that had come before.
Liberation. Land reform. Landlords. Poor and lower-middle peasant class. Bourgeoisie class. Proletarian class. Capitalist. Comprador. Exploitation. The oppressor and the oppressed. Chunyu recognized every character of the phrases, but their accumulative effect generated a fog in her mind. What a waste, the previous twenty-one years of her life, since everything she had learned now needed to be unlearned. In bleak moments of doubt, she started to question whether she had lost her marbles, a dog’s instinct to scent out new surroundings, to survive and thrive.
“What’s the difference between a capitalist and a bourgeoisie?” One day after dinner, catching Mei in a rare moment of quiet relaxation, Chunyu ventured to ask, “What do you think our father is, then?” Their father was a well-to-do tea merchant in a town called East Creek, about eighty kilometers from the city of Wenzhou, where Chunyu would later come to settle.
A soft knot started to form on Mei’s brow where her thoughts traveled.
“Big money and small money, I guess,” the answer came, slow and hesitant in the beginning, but quickly gathering confidence as it rolled on. “Our father is bigger than a bourgeoisie, but not quite to the scale of a capitalist. He is a sure oppressor, though. Their marriage was purchased, there was no love in it.”
Chunyu listened quietly, not totally convinced. It didn’t need a genius to see that Mother hadn’t been happy in the marriage, but was she oppressed, honestly? Father’s provision had seemed, in general, to keep them comfortable and there had been moments, rare and fleeting as they were, when Father had tried to put his best foot forward to win Mother’s smile. The true and final answer was buried with Mother. A marriage is like a pair of shoes: only the wearer knows whether they fit, went the old saying.
But Chunyu, a silent dissenter in the making, restrained herself from a rushed comment. Her instinct whispered to her, loudly, to let Mei have her say. The gush of Mei’s self-conscious rectitude had to find a pair of willing and receptive ears, if she, Chunyu, wished to share a corner of Mei’s roof in peace.
3.
Still settling in, Chunyu tried to make herself useful in her idle time by helping the maid. An assistant to the domestic assistant, she was amused with her new role.
The city was still in a chaotic stage of transition, with the new power treading its way—tentatively in the beginning but growing bolder with each step—through the old patchwork of the governing system, establishing its new roots as it gradually advanced. A salary system was yet to be established for government employees. At the time, every need was provided for by the Party: food, lodging, furniture, medical care, schools, marriage, divorce, burial, daily essentials, and especially, the needs of the soul.
