A Hundred Flowers (3 page)

*   *   *

Kai Ying squirmed in the hard chair and looked down at herself. For the first time she realized she was still dressed in the pale yellow cotton tunic and pants she slept in, having hastily thrown on only an old cotton sweater. Thankfully, she’d had the presence of mind to change into street shoes. Kai Ying couldn’t help but think how chaotic she must look. Even in the sticky heat, she felt a chill and pulled her sweater tight across her body. Wei was still wearing the same threadbare brown
mein po,
the silk padded jacket he refused to throw away, even with a new one in his closet. She leaned over and touched the edge of his frayed sleeve, careful not to disturb him. His eyes were still closed, his breathing even. For a moment, she thought he might really have fallen asleep, but she detected the slightest movement of his hand resting on his knee and knew that he was awake. She studied her father-in-law closely, looking for the subtle characteristics that were carried over from father to son. There was a definite resemblance between them around the eyes and in his strong chin. She could already see that Sheng would have the same thick, gray brows when he was older. They were both good-looking men. Sheng wasn’t quite as tall but was lean and solidly built, with thick, unusually wavy hair. His real power and grace came through in his passion for his family and his beliefs. It’s what had attracted her to him from the very beginning. She sometimes saw the same fearlessness in their son, and when she did, she felt the ache of not knowing when she’d see her husband again.

Kai Ying loved both father and son for their strengths, and despite their weaknesses. She stood between the two, balancing their personalities. The one thing she was certain united them both was their love for Tao. Their differences aside, she saw what wonderful teachers they were in the way they always inspired the boy, keeping Tao interested in the world around him. She couldn’t imagine what she’d do if Wei wasn’t there at the hospital with her.

Just then, someone coughed and Kai Ying looked up. Across the aisle from them sat a pale young girl watching her. The girl’s hair was pulled back in a ponytail and angry red pimples peppered her forehead and cheeks. She wore a soiled, loose-fitting cotton jacket and pants, and her thin hands lay on the rounded bulge of her stomach. She appeared fourteen at most, Kai Ying guessed, just a child. But her watchful eyes seemed older, and there was something about the girl that kept her from turning away. Instead, Kai Ying wanted to lean closer, place her fingers on the girl’s wrist to feel her pulse. Just by looking at her, she knew the girl lacked the iron and nutrition needed for the baby’s health and growth. She would also need a cleanser of rhubarb, phellodendron, skullcap, and sophora to quiet the heat in her body that was causing the acne. It would also help to prevent any future scarring. Underneath it all, there was a pretty young girl.

*   *   *

Kai Ying was suddenly startled by a woman’s scream coming from the hospital corridor, which quickly dissolved into a mournful cry. She sat up straight and her body stiffened as she listened to the consoling voices that followed.
No,
she thought.
No, that won’t be me. Tao will be all right.
Fear rose to her throat. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on finding tranquillity the way her father-in-law did, but all she heard was a swell of voices rising in confusion all around her.

Wei

When Wei closed his eyes, he felt comforted by the darkness. If he were patient the noise would soon quiet to a thin whisper and the black shadows moving against his eyelids would gradually fade away. Then the images he carefully conjured up would slowly come into focus. It was similar to the only moving picture he had ever seen, since he’d rarely had the time or inclination for entertainment when he was still teaching and researching. But once he retired, Sheng had finally persuaded him to see a film just before Tao was born. After the Party came into power, only anti-bourgeoisie, pro-Communist movies were allowed to be shown by the new government. Downtown at the Golden Palace Theater,
The White-Haired Girl
was already a well-known favorite, based on the famous opera about a young girl who escapes the cruelties of an evil landlord after her father is killed, and manages to survive in the wilderness against all odds. Several years later, when she’s found by the young man who loves her, her hair has turned completely white from all the hardships she has had to face.

Wei had never forgotten how the screen flickered with light before the actors appeared like magic, coming to life before his eyes. As he sat enthralled that afternoon in the darkened theater, he couldn’t help but think of Liang, his own white-haired woman. She hadn’t faced the same kind of hardships, but her hair did begin to turn prematurely gray not long after Sheng’s birth. Yet she refused to color it, or to drink his mother’s black moss soup boiled with the immortal herb
He Shou Wu
to help darken it again. Wei had loved her tenacity and independence.

Now, every time Wei closed his eyes, instead of clearing his mind as Kai Ying and Sheng assumed he did in meditation, he waited until the light flickered on in his head and brought Liang back to life. He had met her on a day not unlike this one, gray and wet, with a mist that veiled and softened everything around them on campus. He had been teaching at Lingnan University for three years when he saw Liang walking across the grounds with some other students. It was the way she moved that attracted him at first, floating among them, as if she were in a Pu Ru painting walking through the mist. And there she was, with him once again. He was amazed at how real it felt to see her in his mind’s eye, standing there with her hand held out to him, or to imagine her warmth as she leaned toward him and touched his cheek. “You’re tired,” she said, her voice comforting, her beauty stealing his breath away. It was all he could do to keep himself from smiling, from laughing aloud with happiness to see her again. He never dreamed he would have been so lucky to have met and married someone as remarkable as Liang.

The noise in the waiting room rose and fell around Wei, threatening to drive Liang away as he struggled to hang on to her. He felt his heart beating faster.
I need you,
he thought,
I always have.
He tasted something acidic, the regret of not having shown her just how much. Watching her smile as she slowly faded away, he kept his eyes closed.

*   *   *

Beyond the surrounding turmoil, his grandson was alone somewhere in the hospital and there was nothing he could do but wait. Wei wondered if it was some kind of retribution for his years of self-absorption. He had always been too involved in his own work, never taking into consideration how it might affect those around him. Rather than going into business as his father had wished when he graduated from Lingnan University, he concentrated on his art history studies, preoccupied with teaching and research. The thought of making money never occurred to him. He was thirty when he finally married Liang, and long after they’d given up on having a child, Sheng came along unexpectedly almost ten years later. Through it all, Wei continued to work long hours, sorting through the evolution of art in each dynasty, cataloguing every artifact or painting, recording each piece of information with the knowledge that this was his small contribution to the long, complicated history of China. What he relished most of all was discovering how the past had brought them to the present. He told himself that his work was a part of all their legacies, but was it? By the time he paused long enough, Wei had missed so much of Sheng’s childhood that he had little memory of what his son was like as a boy.

Liang passed away a year after he retired. He lived in quiet despair at having lost Liang just when he could finally have spent more time with her. Each morning, it took all his energy just to get out of bed, and it wasn’t until his grandson’s birth the following year, in 1951, that he found his footing again. His greatest regret was that Tao never knew Liang, his white-haired grandmother.

Unlike with his son, Wei gave his grandson his full attention. He couldn’t imagine life without Tao; the little boy was their beating heart, their future. Wei had taught him to recite the names of the four greatest dynasties before he could string a full sentence together. He could still hear the boy recite
“Han, T’ang, Sung, and Ming”
over and over, like a musical chant. It rang through the courtyard all through the day, becoming the lullaby that put him to bed each night.

Wei had never been so proud.

*   *   *

Even with his eyes closed, Wei felt his daughter-in-law’s gaze upon him, a shadow and the warm movement of air as she moved closer. He kept his eyes closed and hung on to his thoughts for a moment longer. Kai Ying was a good woman. Liang had told him as much from the very beginning, even when he felt uncomfortable having a stranger in the house. “She’s a young woman with a good heart, quick to learn, and most importantly, she will keep Sheng rooted,” his wife had said. By then, Liang hadn’t been feeling well, and he realized now that she knew her life was coming to an end. He could only imagine the relief she must have felt entrusting her family to a young woman in whom she felt confident. Almost ten years later, Kai Ying hadn’t let her down.

“
Lo Yeh,
the doctor is here,” Kai Ying whispered. Her breath brushed against his ear.

Wei opened his eyes slowly and cleared his throat, waiting a moment for the world to refocus. He glanced over at Kai Ying to see the quiet, desperate look on her face, the tiny lines of fear that crept from the corners of her pursed lips. He wished Liang were there; she would know how to console their daughter-in-law. Sheng took after his mother in that way. He was always the better classroom teacher, involved and well liked by his students. Wei’s own inability to say the right words felt like a stubborn knot caught in the middle of his throat. He reached over and put his hand on hers.

Kai Ying

The doctor who finally spoke to them was clinical and detached. He kept his eyes focused on his clipboard when he told them Tao’s right leg had suffered a severe compound fracture. The same height as Kai Ying, he had a serious, careful appearance, from his thick black glasses to his perfectly parted hairline. He appeared slightly anemic, his skin pale and smooth, almost translucent. A prominent blue vein pulsed at his temple. She wondered if he spent any time outdoors in the sun and fresh air, and would have immediately prescribed it if he ever came to her, along with a soup of ginseng, wolfberries, and astragalus roots for energy and blood flow.

He ushered them out to the dank hallway to talk. Black scuff marks traveled along the walls from the gurneys and wheelchairs carelessly knocked against them. From somewhere, Kai Ying felt a slight breeze whispering against the back of her neck. Her throat was parched and she felt her father-in-law standing closely beside her, waiting. While she listened, she couldn’t take her eyes off of the brownish stain on the sleeve of the doctor’s otherwise white coat. He told them that Tao also had some deep bruising and lacerations and would be watched closely overnight for any signs of head trauma. But it was the leg that was of concern. At Tao’s age, it was the growth plate fracture he worried about; it needed to completely heal in order for the bone to continue to grow normally. If it closed as a result of the fracture, it would leave his right leg shorter, causing a limp for the rest of his life. They had already reset the bone, sewn up the outer wound, and put a cast on him. It would be followed by a week to ten days’ stay in the hospital. “Your son’s very lucky,” the doctor added, glancing up for the first time. “His leg took the full impact of the fall. Otherwise, we would be having a different conversation right now. You should be very thankful he’s alive.”

Kai Ying’s mind raced.
Alive.
She swallowed the word as if it were some healing medicine. She immediately thought of the herbs she needed to buy to help Tao’s fracture heal while he recuperated. She had the astragalus roots, tienchi ginseng, and tangerine peel, but needed safflower and Eucommia bark from the herb shop, which she wouldn’t be able to buy until tomorrow when Tao was awake and would need the soup to strengthen his
qi,
the healing life force that kept the blood flowing from his kidneys to the fractures.

She turned toward her father-in-law, who stared intently at the doctor while he spoke. “We’re thankful for the good news,” he said.

She heard the edge of relief in Wei’s tone.

“May we see him?” she asked, her eyes finally moving from the doctor’s sleeve to meet his gaze.

The doctor peered over his clipboard at her for a moment too long, as if noticing her for the first time.

“I want to see him,” she said again, louder. Only for Tao could she find the courage to insist.

“Of course,” the doctor answered.

As they followed him down the hallway, the doctor assured them Tao was sedated and resting comfortably. He should sleep through to the morning, and the doctor advised them to go home and get some rest. “Tomorrow will be another long day,” he reminded them.

She nodded politely, all the while thinking it couldn’t possibly be longer than the day she had just lived through.

*   *   *

Tao’s room was small and bare. It was dark in the late-afternoon gloom. He seemed to be swallowed up by all the tubes and a machine attached to him that monitored his heart rate with a beeping sound that filled the room.
Alive,
she thought each time it beeped. She stood by the bed and watched the steady rise and fall of his chest. He had always been thin, full of energy and curiosity, a sweet long-limbed boy whose recent spurt in height made him appear older than he was. Now he looked so young and helpless. His bruised and tender body seemed too thin under the white sheet. There was a tube in his left arm, a clear liquid dripping slowly into it, while his other arm was bandaged and resting on a pillow. His right leg was in a cast, propped up and held together in a sling contraption that kept it from moving in any direction. It all looked torturous, but the drugs allowed him to sleep. She hoped he wouldn’t wake in the middle of the night frightened and in terrible pain.