A Hundred Flowers (7 page)

*   *   *

The words of the hated poem suddenly returned to Kai Ying,
“Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.”
She could still hear Sheng’s voice that spring afternoon in 1956 when he returned home from teaching, brimming with news. “The Party has just announced they want to hear from all intellectuals and artists on ways to improve China and the Party,” he told her, breathless, his face flushed with excitement.

“What are you talking about?” Kai Ying asked. She was in the kitchen, making a soup with lily leaf root for Tao’s cough. The steam rose and filled the room.

“Mao is calling it the ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign,’ in hopes of building a stronger China,” he said, unbuttoning his gray Mao jacket. “It’s our chance to step forward and let the Party know what we think. If no one does, how will anything change?”

Kai Ying watched his dark eyes come alive. He sounded so hopeful, happier than she’d seen him in a very long time.

“How can you trust them?” she asked, knowing that Mao and his Party had waged an ongoing persecution of all artists and intellectuals during the past decade. During that time, most intellectuals and counterrevolutionaries met secretly and learned to keep to themselves, having cultivated a constant distrust of the People’s Party. “It’s a trick,” she said. “They won’t suddenly change.” Kai Ying couldn’t understand how Sheng could be so easily fooled by Party rhetoric.

“What if it isn’t a trick?” he asked. Sheng smiled, refusing to let her dampen his enthusiasm. “What if it’s a rare opportunity for change?”

Kai Ying shook her head and remained quiet. She feared that Mao listened only to the sound of his own voice, and she didn’t want Sheng to be fooled. He had stepped closer to her and reached for her hand. As if he knew what she was thinking, he promised to be patient, to wait and see what happened before he became involved in anything. Even then, she wished it would all just go away.

For almost a year, caution prevailed, everyone suspicious that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was just another Mao ploy to weed out the nonconformist intellectuals. But in February 1957, the Party made another plea for participation. Not only had Mao approved of this new vision, but Chou En-lai was also calling for constructive criticism, reiterating the belief that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was needed to make China stronger and better. “We might not trust Mao,” Sheng told her, “but Chou En-lai has always been a man of reason and humanity.” By May, scientists, teachers, and students gradually grew bolder in raising their voices. And what began as careful, guarded steps quickly escalated. Posters by students went up in universities criticizing the Party, their words growing harsher with arrogant confidence as each day passed. “The Privileged Party” was a rallying slogan that sprang up over and over in letters to the newspapers, written accusingly in thick, black strokes on posters, and chanted at gathered forums followed by
“The Party grows fat, while the people suffer!”

All of May and June of last year, Kai Ying saw the growing tide as the voices around her rose and anger roiled on both sides. She couldn’t help but worry, knowing that Sheng might be one of those voices.
“Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go!”
she said to him. He had promised. But he was in and out of a flurry of meetings, even as he was careful never to say anything specific to her about his involvement. Sheng hadn’t told her about the letter he’d written to the Premier’s Office, and so far the authorities had refused her many requests to see it. Was there even a letter? Why had he signed his name? Did he think they wouldn’t find him? Did he really believe some neighbor or colleague or student wouldn’t report his clandestine meetings? Sheng had always been headstrong, but never arrogant. How could he do that to her? How dare he? Within weeks, once the criticism turned directly toward the Party members and Mao himself, the Hundred Flowers Campaign was abruptly halted and all the counterrevolutionaries arrested.

Sheng included.

In the end, the Hundred Flowers Campaign had failed miserably and there was only one school of thought, that which belonged to the Party. Kai Ying should have begged Sheng not to do anything stupid. She should have screamed and cried harder until he listened. But deep down she knew it would have done no good. Now all she could think of was: had Sheng become a shadow? Kai Ying pushed the thought out of her mind and looked down at the letter in her hand.

Luoyang is different. The land is wide and flat and with little green to be seen here. I find myself thinking about the kapok tree, having taken it for granted all the years it bloomed in the courtyard. My entire lifetime and I barely noticed. Here, when the wind blows across the endless plains at night, it sounds like a thousand voices crying out. The days are hot and dry now, and I wonder what the winter will bring. Everything about this place feels extreme. I live in a small room with five others. We work twelve to fourteen hour days in a stone quarry and you might not believe how strong I’ve gotten.

Kai Ying didn’t have to be told that such back-breaking work was grueling and dangerous, tons and tons of rock to be blasted from the mountainsides, carried out, and broken up. It was work that Sheng, a teacher and scholar, wasn’t used to doing. It was work that no human being should be doing. She worried about the multitude of accidents that could happen that had nothing to do with the other everyday constants, the struggle to stay healthy when there was never enough food or rest or adequate sanitation.

Just writing your name makes me feel better, as if you’re somehow closer to me and not all these miles away. Tell my father that I’m well. Tell Tao that I’ll be home soon and we’ll all finally take that trip to White Cloud Mountain. It’s the dream I hang on to each and every day.

*   *   *

The second letter arrived almost four months later, in February of this year, and all signs of enthusiasm had worn away with the news he wouldn’t be able to come home for the New Year. It was too far. A lifetime away. She and Wei had sent letters, parcels with dried and canned foods using their allotted food coupons, but never heard whether Sheng had received them. Kai Ying had written to him at once after Tao had fallen. She had naïvely hoped the authorities would allow Sheng to come home for a visit. She had hoped for a reply, just a few words, anything that would let her know he was all right. This was what terrified Kai Ying the most; she knew that if Sheng had heard Tao was hurt, he would have written back to her immediately. During her most difficult moments, Kai Ying resurrected the few personal lines from his letters she had committed to memory.
Don’t worry, I’m holding up. I miss you all terribly. Will I recognize Tao when I see him again? Will he recognize me? And you? You.

She heard the anguish in his voice.

She wasn’t going to cry.

Wei

After breakfast, Wei climbed the stairs to his bedroom for the book of myths he wanted to show Tao. His room was down the hall toward the back of the villa, larger and cooler during the hot, muggy days. It had once been his mother and father’s room, and later, the room that he and Liang shared. His mother had been his father’s fourth and much younger wife. Even as a boy, Wei thought they looked more like father and daughter than husband and wife. After his father’s first wife passed away, wives number two and three, his aunties, stayed in rooms at the other end of the hall. His older half sisters were married by the time he entered school and he had always felt like an only child growing up.

Wei’s father often stood on the balcony and watched him playing in the courtyard below when he was a boy, much as he now watched Tao. He was too young then to realize that he had been the much-longed-for son of a seventy-year-old man.

*   *   *

Wei looked for the book for Tao. Every wall was stacked with crowded bookcases. Tao had once said his bedroom resembled a library, which Wei supposed it did, and for which he was grateful. The books reminded him of his office at the university, a place he felt safe.

There had once been a real library downstairs in the villa. Now it was used by Mr. and Mrs. Chang as their bedroom. After Liang’s death, the bookcases had been moved up to his room. As a boy, Wei had spent countless hours in his father’s library, sitting in his high-back brown leather chair, reading. His father was often away on business and Wei seriously doubted he had spent much time reading any of the hundreds of books that once lined his bookshelves. So Wei took it upon himself to read them. He smiled now to think how little he’d understood of what he read back then.

Just yesterday morning, Tao had asked him if he had really read all the books on his bookshelf. Wei laughed. “Those are only a handful of what I’ve read,” he answered. “You should see all the books I’ve put away,” he said. “Hidden away.”

“Hidden?” Tao had asked. “Why?”

Wei smiled and leaned closer. “Well, unlike when I was a boy, the government we have now dislikes certain kinds of books.”

“Why would they dislike books?”

“Because all good books are filled with different ideas and truths, and the Party disapproves of books by authors who say something different from what they believe in. They’re afraid we’ll form our own opinions and no longer listen to them. If they find your
ye ye
’s books, they’ll destroy them.”

“Are your books bad?”

“No, they’re good,” he answered. “It’s important for us to understand and consider all sides before we make decisions.”

“And that’s why you’re hiding them?”

Wei nodded. “I’m saving them for you. When you’re older, you can read them all and make up your own mind about the life you want to live.”

“Where have you hidden them?” Tao asked.

He lowered his voice. “It’s our secret. When your leg has healed, I’ll show you.”

*   *   *

As Wei searched his bookshelves, his gaze halted at a slim volume of poetry, given to him on a long-ago birthday by a teenaged Sheng. Wei had written poetry as a young man and once entertained the thought of becoming a poet. The book, by the famous Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu, was a favorite of his. Reaching for it now, Wei hoped that he’d told Sheng it remained one of his most cherished gifts. Every morning since Sheng had been taken away, Wei read a poem from the book, which somehow made him feel closer to his son. Now he sat down at his desk and flipped through the worn pages, the book opening naturally to the poems where the spine was broken. He read the first stanza of the aptly titled “Thinking of My Boy,” written for the poet’s favorite son.

Comes spring once more,

Pony Boy, and still we

Cannot be together; I

Comfort myself hoping

You are singing with

The birds in the sunshine …

Wei stopped reading, suddenly angered. He knew Sheng wasn’t where he could be singing with birds in the sunshine. Just after Sheng was taken away, Kai Ying had pleaded with the police officials to tell her his whereabouts, but to no avail. Two months later, they received word that Sheng had been sent to be reeducated in Luoyang in the western Henan province. As she read the note to Wei, Kai Ying’s face turned pale. Luoyang was in the central plains of China, more than a thousand miles away by train, another world away. They had hoped and prayed that Sheng was somewhere closer in Guangdong province. There, at least they could visit, and there was the chance of his returning home for a week’s furlough during the New Year holidays. Instead, it would take that long just to travel back and forth from Luoyang.

Wei had once studied artifacts from the region around Luoyang, one of the cradles of Chinese civilization and one of the original Four Great Ancient Capitals of China. Now he could only imagine it as a place of darkness and desolation, where men and women were worked to death or beaten to death or starved to death, a place where even birds never ventured unless they were vultures.

Wei had an old colleague, a Professor Wong from Lingnan, a steadfast and intelligent man who had always been an outspoken critic of Chairman Mao. His family had begged him to leave China before the Communists came into power, but he had refused. Within weeks of the new government, he was seized in the middle of the night by the police and sent to a reeducation camp in Shandong province to work in the mines. Before the sun rose each day, the prisoners were sent deep into dark, dank tunnels, reemerging later into darkness. Did Wong think even the sunlight had abandoned him? He was seventy years old and unfit for hard labor, his body failing even if his indomitable spirit hadn’t. The authorities said he had died of natural causes, but Wei knew they had killed him, just as if they’d held a gun to his head.

*   *   *

Wei’s eyes filled with tears. He swallowed, the words of the poem tasting bitter in his mouth. He closed the book and placed it on his desk, then unlocked a drawer and pulled out his worn leather-bound journal. In it was a rough copy of the letter he had sent to the Premier’s Office. The lines were burned into his memory.
If China is to become a stronger nation, the Party must open its eyes and see that power comes from free expression. What freedom do we have in a Communist society if artists and intellectuals are tortured for following their hearts? What freedom do we have if art and ideas and politics can’t be appreciated and openly discussed? How can there be strength in suppression?

Wei had written his thoughts with such truth and clarity, as if a light had suddenly flooded a long-darkened room. Now those very same ideas had turned to needles pricking his skin, and the truth he’d written had condemned his son to hard labor. After a lifetime of keeping to himself and remaining closemouthed, what made him write the letter and sign his name? A moment of vanity and conceit, a need to feel important again, which only served to implicate Sheng, who had always been the one active in school forums and politics, and whose given name was also Weisheng, meaning
greatness is born,
each of them the long-awaited sons of their parents. Wei and Liang had called him Sheng since birth, so as not to cause confusion with his own name. So as not to cause confusion. Confusion.