A Hundred Flowers (6 page)

As he lay in bed, Tao worried about missing school when the term began again in early September. What new characters would they learn to write in his absence? And what was his best friend, Little Shan, up to? He had received some get-well cards from a few of his classmates when he was in the hospital. Since then, he’d heard nothing, even though Little Shan had written he would visit soon. What really upset Tao was the certain drop in his class standing if he didn’t return to school at the beginning of the year. He’d always been a bright, attentive student and before his accident, was ranked second in his class. Now, even though they were best friends, it bothered him that Little Shan might jump ahead of him. The only person he knew who was smarter than he was was Ling Ling. She was consistently number one and the prettiest girl in his class. Tao liked her seated first in the class, especially if it meant he was seated behind her and could watch her two pigtails dance back and forth every time she raised her hand to answer a question. Every once in a while, she even turned around and smiled at him when he answered a question correctly. Tao’s face flushed warm at the thought. He wanted to be back at school sitting behind Ling Ling, playing Ping-Pong with Little Shan, even doing morning exercises in the crowded noisy yard full of students.

*   *   *

Tao heard the clink of the black iron pot on the fire downstairs and knew his mother was beginning her workday. Every morning since he had come home, even before she went out to unlock the front gate for her patients, she brewed a special tea for him. She held great hope that the herbs would help his body recover from the trauma he had suffered. “It’s not just your leg that must heal; your entire body needs to find balance again,” she said. People came to her from all over Dongshan believing the same thing.

Tao grimaced. The teas were harder to swallow, simmered down to a dark, potent essence. He preferred her soups, which were easier to drink, herbs and ginseng boiled with a piece of pork or a whole chicken if they had enough food coupons left at the end of the month.

His mother had to cajole him. “Drink this. I know it’s bitter, but it will strengthen your blood and help you to grow strong,” she urged him each morning as she lifted the bowl to his lips.

The tea tasted acrid all the way down his throat. In the bottom of the bowl, the dark, watery remains resembled a bird’s nest of twigs and leaves.

*   *   *

Tao had always liked to watch his mother working in the kitchen, wrinkling his nose at the sharp, pungent smells of the herbs that she slipped into boiling water from brown paper packets. A damp, earthy smell like musk arose, tempered by the sweetness of red dates and dried figs she added to the soup. Entering the steamy kitchen was like stepping into another world where his
ma ma
was a pretty
alchemist,
a new word he’d just read in a book, someone who had the power to transform and enchant. He watched her with her patients, the way she listened and soothed. She knew each person not only by name, but by ailment.
“Here comes Mrs. Yee who suffers from bursitis,”
or
“Young Tan needs more herbs to warm his blood,”
or
“Chong’s rheumatism must be flaring up again in this wet weather.”
It felt strange to think that he was now one of her patients.

*   *   *

Before his fall, Tao’s mother occasionally asked him to deliver herbs to nearby neighbors, which made him feel important. And it was always his job to bring packets of herbs to Auntie Song for her arthritis and high blood pressure. He knew his mother liked Auntie Song for her truthful, no-nonsense ways. If the courtyard was the domain of his grandfather, all he had to do was follow the brick path that led to the backyard vegetable garden, which belonged to Auntie Song. Tao could usually find her in the garden, or in her small kitchen cleaning and cooking the fresh vegetables she’d just picked. For every packet of herbs he brought to Auntie Song, he carried back three times as many vegetables to his mother in return.

Tao once heard his grandfather say Song had lived through many difficulties in her life, and had been married for a long time to a very bad man, but that she was sturdy and could endure, and that’s the way Tao thought of her: someone with strength, not unlike the kapok tree. He liked the way Auntie Song looked. Her face had more wrinkles than he’d ever seen before, but she had only threads of gray in her hair. When she smiled, he could see her missing front tooth, a black hole like a door swung open. She was taller and heavier than his mother, though not fat. Auntie Song liked to keep busy, her hands always in motion, planting or darning or cooking, and he always felt safe around her.

Almost every day after school, Tao helped Auntie Song in her vegetable garden. He pulled weeds, fetched buckets of water, or brought shears and string to tie her long beans together. In early March, she’d taught him to plant his first snow peas, dropping the small seeds into the cool, moist dirt and covering them. “Be careful never to overwater them,” Auntie Song had said, hovering over him. “The seeds will rot if they get too wet.” He checked them every day, thrilled when the first green shoots emerged from the dirt. His
ye ye
had said they were the best snow peas he’d ever eaten.

Tao wondered what Auntie Song was doing just then, and how the garden was faring without him. He looked at the thick plaster shell wrapped around his leg and couldn’t wait to get it off. He was determined to be completely well by the fall planting.

Outside, the hot wind had picked up, the leaves already beginning to fall from the spiny armed branches of the tree, scratching across the stone pavement. Tao shifted in his bed to get a better look out the window. Every spring, his mother had sent him out to the courtyard to pick up the fallen flower petals from the kapok, which she then dried and later boiled into a tea that calmed fevers. In the fall, he gathered the green kapok leaves to be crushed and rubbed on bruised skin. While he recuperated, his
ma ma
would have to pick up the leaves herself. Tao knew he would forever look upon the tree differently now. Every time he was sent outside to gather the smooth, waxy red petals, or the lance-shaped leaves of the kapok, he would be grateful for their power to heal.

Suyin

Suyin woke with a start. A noise made by a stalking cat or scurrying rat in the alleyway had entered her dreams and pulled her out of sleep. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she would sleep through the night and forget her gnawing hunger. Suyin lay atop her makeshift bed of the rags and straw she had collected, but it still wasn’t enough to ward off the discomfort of the hard ground where she slept tucked away by the back door of the curio shop.

Suyin shifted, the baby a pressing weight. Her back ached and her stomach hurt. If she was hungry, she knew the baby inside her was too, and the thought left her both scared and anxious. She looked around but it was still dark, the moonlight casting the small world around her in shadows. Her tunic was damp with sweat. She never liked the month of August. It was always the most uncomfortable time of the year, the humidity so high her mother had once claimed it made the walls shed tears. Even now, in the dead of night, the air was suffocating, so heavy it felt as if she could actually hold it in her hand.

It was still too early for Suyin to walk over to the main boulevard and rummage through the garbage. She would also have to wait until the marketplace opened, drawing in the morning crowds. The vendors would be more likely to relent and give her something just to get her out of their way, or else they might be too busy to notice her hand reach in from behind their haggling customers to snatch a steamed bun or mango or turnip. She was always cautious, remembering the story of one thief who had his hand cut off by a butcher’s cleaver when he tried to steal a chicken. He wasn’t much older than she was. Suyin never tried to steal anything more than fruits or vegetables; everything else was too precious to come by, keeping the vendors more attentive.

Suyin rubbed her stomach. “Just wait,” she whispered to the baby. “One day we’ll feast on shrimp dumplings, green onion pancakes, and buns filled with red bean.” They were all of her favorites that she could only dream about, but just the thought of it all now made her stomach clench and she swallowed down the sourness. Suyin leaned back in misery. She reached for some of the dry straw and began to chew on it.

Kai Ying

Now that Tao was finally out of the hospital, Kai Ying couldn’t stop watching him.
He’s really home,
she thought. But was he? The more she studied him, the less sure she was that the same Tao had returned to her. The once boisterous and fearless boy she knew had been replaced by a watchful one who lay quietly in bed, his eyes following her every move. She wondered what he was looking at, or what he was looking for, and how she could help him find it.

The small outward signs of his healing were apparent. There were only faint scratches on his face now, and the fading green purplish tint of the ugly bruises on his body, helped by a cream she applied made from the kapok leaves, was almost gone. The irony of it never failed to cross her mind; the tree from which Tao fell was now helping him to heal. But his hair, closely shorn at the hospital, was still a dark shadow on the pale globe of his head. His thin, bony limbs looked as if they could be easily broken if he moved in the wrong way. Kai Ying’s heart ached.

What she couldn’t say aloud was how Tao reminded her even more of Sheng now, how she imagined her husband with the same shaved head and bony frame at the Luoyang reeducation camp, somewhere in the central plains of China. She treasured his two letters, but she hadn’t heard from Sheng again in over six months, and she found herself in a perpetual state of anticipation. Through the heat of summer, she was frozen, waiting to thaw. There were many possible reasons for his silence, but Kai Ying wouldn’t allow herself to think of them. If she didn’t think of them, they wouldn’t be true. She fought hard not to appear sad in front of Tao. As the months went by, she spoke often of Sheng and read Tao snatches from his letters. But since his fall, he hadn’t asked her once about his
ba ba.
He hardly said anything at all.

Who was this boy?

*   *   *

After breakfast each morning, Wei went back upstairs. During Tao’s first week back, she and her father-in-law had taken on their respective roles in his recovery. While Wei was entertaining him with stories about China’s art and history in his calm and steady voice, Kai Ying found it difficult to concentrate on her herb work, which kept her away from Tao most of the day. She listened to her patients and tried to appear concerned and involved, but her mind wandered to her little boy upstairs who had to stay as immobile as possible, held captive by a monstrous cast twice the size of his leg. She didn’t want him shadowed by a limp for the rest of his life. Hadn’t they gone through enough heartache in the past year?

Kai Ying saw these days as a healing time for her father-in-law, too, whose spirits rose every time he was with his grandson. The morning after the incident with the cleaver, Wei had come down to breakfast and apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said, his hands stopping in midair without any other explanation. “I don’t know what came over me.” Kai Ying saw a slight twitching under his left eye. She couldn’t remember his ever apologizing to her, to anyone. “Is everything all right?” she asked. Since Sheng’s arrest, she felt him gradually moving further away from them. He paused for just a moment, before he nodded reassuringly and said, “Everything’s fine.”

The tree had survived. But when they were alone those evenings after they returned from the hospital, she avoided looking directly into his eyes, afraid she would see the look of anguish and defeat in them again. And every time she walked out to the courtyard, she found herself keeping a careful distance from the kapok tree.

*   *   *

As Kai Ying waited for her next patient to arrive, she heard Tao’s laughter from upstairs. Wei was with him. It was music, a glorious sound coming from her child that filled her with gratitude. For the first time in almost a month, she allowed herself to relax. It was as if she’d been holding her breath ever since Tao’s fall, waiting for what was going to happen next, bracing herself the way Sheng must have to brace himself every morning in order to get through each day.

How proud Sheng would be of Tao. Kai Ying smiled, reached into her pocket, and touched her husband’s two letters; her smile faded. She took one letter out of the envelope as she had a hundred times before, her eyes quickly scanning the all too familiar characters that filled the thin sheets of paper. He spoke sparingly of his life at the camp and the work he was assigned to do there.

Dear Kai Ying,

This is the first letter I’ve been allowed to write since arriving here in Luoyang almost two weeks ago. There was no way to get word to you sooner, but I’m fine and everything will be all right. I was detained at the public security bureau for weeks until it was decided I would be sent to Henan province for reeducation. Then I was told I could write to you after I arrived.

Kai Ying knew Sheng couldn’t write what he was really feeling. His letter would be scrutinized by the authorities before it was sent and he couldn’t risk it not being sent to her. In every line, she heard his voice; in each pause were the words he couldn’t say. From the moment Sheng was arrested, she knew the police had already found him guilty of being a counterrevolutionary. And of course, the letter he had sent to the Premier’s Office was all the evidence they needed. Others had been sentenced for far less. The police were given full power by the Party to carry out administrative detentions without the assistance of lawyers, or the judicial system, for any disruptive acts as long as they weren’t criminal. The men and women arrested for any type of nonconformist behavior were almost always sentenced to reeducation through labor.

Sheng had once told her of colleagues he knew who were sent away for years to do manual labor, disappearing from their lives as if they had never been there. “They became shadows,” he said. Some were gone for a year or two, while others had still not returned to their families.