Diamond Head (4 page)

Hong looked up and something substantial, something vibrant crossed her face, like a flash of accidental brilliance.

“I have one more story,” Hong said, leaning forward once again as a smile spread below her cheeks. She raised her hand, her open palm. “Just one more,” she said, “and I will answer your question.”

I can see from her face that she wants to be alone. Bohai’s daughter sits in her pajamas. They are green and made of a shiny material that looks uncomfortable for sleeping. But she will listen because I am old and because I have asked her to listen. I will not waste her time. I will tell her the best story I know.

1900

G
UANGDONG
, C
HINA

The journey was unthinkable.

They told me time and again that I would not make it. They said I would be taken, tortured, raped. That no one would take pity on a Boxer’s daughter, on a Boxer’s wife. And even if, by some miracle, a spirit soldier did appear, pulling me along from sun to moon, finding me a patch of earth to rest my body, I would surely starve—shrivel like a lemon peel under the August sun.

I traveled sixty days, Shen’s voice in the hollows of my ears, in the pads of my feet, the tug of my red string pulling me onward. As if he knew he would die, he left me with a single name—that of his only brother—in the province of Guangdong, a place I had never been, their spoken word like a taunt, a jumble of sounds just beyond my reach. The night the liberation attacked, blasting through the wall with their heavy cannons, the sounds of men screaming like fireworks in flight, Shen demanded that I memorize his brother’s name, made me promise that if anything went wrong, I would find his family in the south. And so I did. If not for my own salvation then for his; to deliver the news of his departure to his only relatives, so that his soul might eventually find peace.

Sixty days I walked, the landscape changing with every week. I kept my silence throughout, offering myself one indulgence, a
single question when I felt it was time.
What day is today?
I would ask a stranger—always a woman, a mother with a child, a girl with a small load strapped to her back. I chose them carefully, searching for faces with bumps on their chins, a sign of kindness, a lucky omen. Tuesday, they would reply, or Thursday or Saturday, and I knew only then how much time had passed.

In the sixth week, the weather changed; it slowed me down. The hot temper of the south, the fire element—I began to feel the changes I was warned of. During the day it rained, and when it stopped, the dampness hung in the air and on my clothes, sour smells of mildew lifting from my flesh. The dry, flat land of the north was replaced with rice paddies that lined the roads, sinking deep into the earth, collecting the rain, bright green stalks reaching higher than my waist. At first it struck me as beautiful, the change of colors and smells of fresh shoots and foreign manure—but as night fell my mind changed. It was filthy sleeping on the soggy earth, my clammy body wishing for arid land, baked hard and dry during the summer months.

The women changed as well. They were darker and smaller, their eyes wider and larger than my own. When I summoned the courage to ask the day, my words were met with confusion, with strange liquid sounds, with silence. I listened to the language change, discerning what little I could, and the less familiar it all felt, the more I knew I was getting closer—that it was time to use the paper Shen had written for me, his brother’s name, the numbers of his address in small, sturdy strokes. I began to show the paper, shyly at first, which was met with dismissal, then more boldly, the damp desperation seeping through my fingers as I held out the paper, pleading for help.

It was a man. An old, rumpled man with an eye that drooped lower than the other looked at the paper and back at me, his good eye narrowed. He held my gaze for a long time, chewing at his lips, his teeth mostly gone. Finally, he pointed to his right, down a wide road that led to a neighborhood of houses. He grunted, pushed me in that direction, and I think I ran, emboldened by his answer, the
paper flapping in my hand, searching for the house that Shen had described, with three large brass bells that hung above the door frame.

When I first laid eyes on his brother’s home, my knees as weak as loose hinges, my breath short and hot from overuse, I thought the old man must be mistaken. It was the grandest home I had ever seen, larger than anything I could have drawn on paper, more beautiful than my imagination. It rose two mighty floors, the rounded windows rimmed with gold, the fat shingles of the roof painted smooth and red, the bells exactly as Shen had described. I waited on the street for a second person to pass, this time a woman, who nodded her head as she read my paper. Indeed, I stood before the home of the shipping Leongs—the honorable Leong Fu from the north. The way the woman looked at me, I felt such shame. The way I smelled, the way I looked, the way I grunted my comprehension like a wild beast; suddenly, I saw myself in her eyes. At once, I was aware of where I was, overwhelmed by the vicinity of my task.

I remembered a wooden comb at the bottom of my rucksack. I crouched on the dirt road and nearly fell, dizzy from hunger and fatigue and heat. I held myself up with my right hand and reached my left into the bottom of my bag, feeling for the dull teeth of the comb. And despite my torn clothes and the smell of rust and pigs that clung to my skin, I combed my hair.

I walked to the front door, step by step, my stomach twisting. I could feel the lining tighten under my racing heart. My legs had carried me for sixty days, across a country torn by war and violence, yet these last ten steps were the most uncertain. I knocked on the wooden door, my knuckles growing white with each strike.

I heard footsteps, then the sound of the doorknob turning. I realized I had stopped breathing. The door opened and a young girl wearing servant’s clothes stood in the large frame. The look on her face did not change with the sight of me.

“Hello,” I said in strained Cantonese, flattening the sides of my
trousers with my hands, reciting what little Shen had taught me. “My name is Hong. I like to speak with Leong Fu.”

Now the look of the girl’s face changed. Her eyebrows rose with surprise.

“Leong Fu?” she said, and then something else, her words dipping with a heavy, difficult vowel.

“Hong.” I said my name again, pointing to myself. I began to forget my words; my head began to cloud. “Wife. Leong Shen. Brother Shen—” The girl stopped me by raising a hand into the air. She began to shut the door, bowing her head slightly, when I heard a different voice.

It was a question, followed by footsteps. A thin hand stopped the door from shutting and pulled it back open. Now a second woman stood in the doorway.

She was lovely. Her arms, long and graceful, bent like branches of cherry blossom. The slender bones in her neck and her collar stuck out beautifully. She wore a long lavender dress that fell from her square shoulders and she was so tall—as tall as me but different in every other way. Where my cheeks were padded and soft, cramping the shape of my narrow eyes, rounding my face, the woman before me had skin both even and tight, as if washed smooth by the southern rain, bathed in milk, scrubbed with pearls. The hue of her skin was darker than mine, like the color of damp sand, creating the look of shadows, of angles as it stretched across her wide forehead. A sign of prosperity.

For a moment, I forgot why I was there.

The woman said Shen’s name. Her eyes were as wide as a child’s.

“Yes,” I said in my native Mandarin, but I didn’t recognize my own voice. I stood there silently, looking into this woman’s eyes, everything I had planned to say falling from my head and dropping to the ground. I felt empty.

“Who are you?” The woman asked cautiously, repeating it in Mandarin, the syllables slow and unnatural. “What is your name?”

“My name,” I tried to remember, “is Hong.” I spoke with painful difficulty; the woman nodded me gently along.

“I come from Shandong. I have traveled for days without water or rest to bring your family news of Shen.” I paused and saw behind her a long, dark table. In the middle, there was a display of golden flowers. I took a forceful breath.

“Shen was my husband. We were married before the revolution.” I held out my hand to show her the silver band on my finger. “Shen has been lost to war,” I said, and the words came out exactly, like the words of a poem recited a thousand times. I had practiced them in my head since the beginning of my journey. I needed to be calm when the moment arrived.

The woman’s face was softer now. Her hands had let go of the door. Now she pressed the tips of her fingers together.

“I am Lin,” she said, “wife to Leong Fu. We waited news of Shen and here it arrives. Please.” The sound of my language in her mouth, broken and difficult, made me wish desperately that she would speak Cantonese, that I could hear the voice that matched her face.

Using both hands, Lin pulled the wooden door wider. I stepped through the frame and suddenly it felt like a spring day. Within the house, the floors were cool and fresh. Clean air circulated through the wide hallways. Beyond the front door was the long, dark table, where, with gestures, she explained that we would meet once I was bathed and dressed. She turned to her girl servant and gave her quick instructions before turning down a corridor.

The girl led me down the opposite hallway and into a small bathroom lit by windows covered in thin white paper. She filled the bathtub with water that steamed and smelled like roses. She draped an earth-colored shirt and trousers over a wooden chair and the door clicked behind her.

I was so tired, so heavy from emotion and travel that I could barely understand where I was or how I had gotten there. I undressed quickly, eager to feel clean. I sank into the deep tub, the
hot water collecting the filth from my body, swirling shades of brown and red around me. A square cake of soap sat on a stand beside the tub; I worked it into my flesh, digging the smooth edges of the bar into my back, my arms, my thighs. I held my breath and sank under the water. I closed my eyes and thought about never coming back up.

I thought about the cotton slippers the girl had left for me, and then the pair I had arrived with—the shoes I had left outside the front door. The right side had been tied to my foot with a piece of twine for the last two hundred miles. I had learned to walk with a limp, dragging my right foot along the country roads, kicking up the dust with my sole, afraid that the twine might break. No one stopped to help. Not a soul. In a way, they were right: no one took pity on a dirty Boxer’s wife. But I was not taken, tortured, or raped. And for that, I was thankful. I came up for air.

I stood and let the water drip down my naked body. Pieces of my filth stuck to the sides of the tub. I would clean it later, I thought to myself. Lin was waiting. I dressed slowly. It was strange to have such soft material against my skin. I turned to leave but when I saw the dirty tub again, I couldn’t help it; I had to wipe the inside. I used my old shirt, the one I wore closest to my body that was least soiled. I wet the cloth and removed the bits of dirt from the sides of the tub, dipping the shirt in the brown water, squeezing it out and wiping again. When the largest marks were gone, I hung the shirt on the edge of the tub. I opened the door and walked carefully down the hallway, the cotton slippers like walking on moon cakes, and toward the long, dark table.

When I got to the dining room, I almost fainted. Lin sat in one chair, drinking tea, a steaming bowl of soup to her left. To her right, at the head of the table, sat a man who was an exact copy of Shen. He was better dressed, his arms and cheeks padded with extra flesh, but in his face, in those thick eyelids, that strong jaw—all I could see was my dead husband. I bowed, trying to calm my nerves. I did not
expect to see him there. Lin stood up and said it wasn’t necessary. And please, I should have the bone marrow soup, it would help me regain my strength.

I sat and brought the hot soup to my lips, the gelatin fats rising to the top. It was the first taste of real food since Peking. I had been living off the scraps of pigs, breaking into their pens at night and eating their leftovers. It was mostly rotten cucumbers, raw sweet potatoes, wet piles of spoiled rice. The first two weeks, my body rejected the scraps and the bits of old food rose from my stomach the next morning. But soon enough my body adjusted. It became grateful for what I could give it.

The bowl touched my lips and didn’t come down for a long time. The broth smelled of onions and tasted of beef; fatty, delicious marrow and bits of meat cooked for hours in its own juices. Ribbons of cabbage arrived at my lips. I slurped them like noodles and they melted in my mouth. Heat flooded my body and swam through my veins, first coating the lining of my stomach, then filling it, overflowing and running to my shoulders, my ankles, my fingertips. I ate greedily. My head cleared as I reached the bottom of the bowl. It wasn’t until Mr. Leong began to speak that I finally brought the bowl down from my mouth.

He had Shen’s voice.

“I understand that you are my brother’s wife,” he said in perfect Mandarin. “Lin has also told me that Shen is no longer with us.” He paused and I put my bowl on the table. He looked down for a moment and then spoke again, his voice gentler now. “If you are willing, I would like to know everything. Anything you’re able to share, Hong, I’d be grateful to hear.”