The Flower Net (29 page)

He’d had visions of how Hulan lived, but her home was far larger, far more beautiful than anything he had imagined. Her personality was everywhere—in the way a piece of embroidered cloth draped over a chair, in the way low celadon pots filled with narcissus bulbs perched on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, in the way she’d set up her New Year’s altar, in the way the rich hues of the antique wood pieces softened the rooms’ clean lines. He lingered by her desk, feeling the smoothness of the rosewood’s grain beneath his fingers, picking up a cloisonné letter opener, caressing the fine lines of a Cantonware vase. Here was Hulan’s life—a little plastic wind-up toy he’d given her more than a decade ago, a photograph of a woman David presumed to be her mother, a few bills, several bankbooks neatly stacked.

Absently he touched them with his finger, and they spilled across the table. Bank of China. Wells Fargo. Citibank. Glendale Federal. Chinese Overseas Bank. These were the same banks where Henglai and Cao Hua had kept their ill-gotten gains. If this weren’t damning enough, there was the matter of the Chinese Overseas Bank. Not only did Guang Mingyun own it, but the Rising Phoenix was laundering its money there. David picked up one of the books, opened it, and was stunned by the balance—$327,000. He checked another and saw a balance of $57,000. He looked through the others. The total was close to two million U.S. dollars.

His knees buckled and he stumbled back into a chair as the realization washed over him. She had betrayed him.

She came out of her bedroom with a silk kimono wrapped around her slim frame and her hair tied up in a towel. The dirt, soot, and grime of the fiery intersection and the back of the farmer’s truck had been washed away from her body.

“Should I hurry?” she asked, her voice as melodious as always. “I can have the car out front take us back to your hotel. I’m sure you’d like to take a shower and change.” Then she walked to the coal stove, put her hands up to feel its heat, and smiled. “Or you could take a bath here. We could spend the rest of the day here if you’d like.”

David was silent.

“Would you like something to eat? Maybe a cup of tea? David? Is something wrong? Are you all right?”

He opened his hands, let the bankbooks slip into his lap, and accused her with his simple question: “What are these?”

A pink flush began at her cleavage, then swiftly crept up her neck and into her face.

“Don’t you have an explanation?” he asked contemptuously. “I didn’t think so.”

“It’s my savings,” she said after a lengthy pause. It galled him that she showed no remorse.

“That’s one thing you could call it,” he said.

He watched as her mouth formed his name. “David?”

“All this must have been very entertaining to you,” he said bitterly. He closed his eyes, trying to wipe away her presence. When he opened them she was still there. “You are such a fucking liar. And I fell for it again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She knelt before him. The silk of her kimono fell open, revealing the curve of her breasts. He pushed her away, stood, and crossed the room. He swung about, strode back to where she sat on the floor, grabbed her arms, and hauled her to her feet. The towel fell from her head and her hair hung in wet strings. His face was inches from hers as his voice grated, “Did you think I was so
stupid
that I wouldn’t figure it out?”

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

“Ever since I got here,” he said, “I relied on you and you pointed me in the wrong direction time and time again. You guided me
away
from what was important. Even when I heard things I didn’t listen. Remember that day at the Black Earth Inn? Remember how Nixon Chen and the others talked about you? How you were named for a model revolutionary, how you yourself were a model Red Guard, how, with your connections, you bought your way out of the commune and came to America? Was it all just an elaborate ploy, like what the Soviets did in the good old days—sending a kid to be raised in enemy territory so she’d grow up to make the best spy with the best cover and no accent?”

He pulled her up against his chest. He could feel her heart pounding against his. He lowered his voice to something almost sensual. “Remember how you
left
me, Hulan? Do you remember that? Did it mean
anything
to you?” Then he held her away from him again. “Remember in Los Angeles how I spilled my guts to you? I thought you would say something that would explain your past actions to me. But no! Why would you tell me the truth? Why would you tell me
anything?
And like an idiot, I didn’t press you.”

She struggled against him now, but he kept his grip. “So we come back to Beijing—your city. The whole time I’m depending on you for translation. Did you ever once tell me the truth of what was said? Even yesterday at the jail, did you really call Zai or was that just some performance? And every suggestion I made, every person I wanted to talk to, you steered me the other way. And your emotions!” A shiver ran through him. “On the back of the truck when you were mourning Peter. Was it an act like everything else?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “In fact, when I look back on it, you have kept the truth from me from the day we met. You never loved me. You always used me. You’re as corrupt, as foul, as revolting…”

He was cut off by her scream. She jerked away from him and fell back against the wall. Her hands clutched mindlessly at the silk that had fallen away from her body. Her face was lowered, but he could see her breath coming short and shallow. Finally, she looked up and met his eyes.

19

L
ATER

The Red Soil Farm

Y
ou want the truth?” she asked. “Where do I begin? With your questions? Yes, that money is mine. Yes, I am rich. I’m supposed to be rich. I’m a Red Princess. I’m from the special class—like Henglai, Bo Yun, Li Nan, and the rest of them.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not,” she said in resignation. After all these years, all that was left was the truth David had wanted for so long. “How can I make you understand? You talk about that day in the Black Earth Inn. Why didn’t you
listen
to Nixon and the rest of them? Why didn’t you pay attention to Peter’s stories of the real Liu Hulan? They
told
you so much about me that I was afraid down to my bones. But then I saw you didn’t,
wouldn’t
, hear it. I never told you things because the bitter truth is you never wanted to hear them. You think you hate me now? You just listen.”

Her hands twisted the kimono’s fabric. “As you know, I was named for Liu Hulan. But how do you emulate a model revolutionary when you are a Red Princess, when you are cushioned by wealth and privilege, when you are surrounded by love and creature comforts?”

She dropped the fabric and gestured to her New Year’s altar and the photos of her ancestors. “This house belonged to my mother’s family. They were imperial performers. I had great-great-aunts who were courtesans in the Forbidden City. This is common knowledge. But most people know little of my father’s family. They look at him and see a dedicated, hardworking man. But for generations the Lius were wealthy landowners. My great-grandfather was a magistrate here in the capital. Even after the fall of the Manchus, the Liu family, unlike my mother’s, kept their power. In fact, they got even richer.”

“I don’t care about them!” David exclaimed. “You’re just telling more stories to lead me away from the truth.”

Hulan didn’t seem to hear him. “My father, like his father before him, was a student of history,” she continued. “He looked at the world and ran away to join Mao. By the time Mao’s troops marched into Beijing in 1949, my father was twenty-four years old and a trusted confidant of the Supreme Leader. My parents were rewarded for their hard work and sacrifice. You know that saying, ‘Everybody works so everybody eats’? That was the essence of Mao’s communism, but from those very first days, some people ate better than others.”

Hulan’s memory drifted back to 1966, when she was eight years old. Mao and his wife had just launched the Cultural Revolution to rid the country of bourgeois forces. “My father took me to Tiananmen Square on August eighteenth to see the first official assembly of the Red Guards. One million of Beijing’s young people crammed together, wearing their parents’ old army uniforms, shouting slogans, singing, waving copies of the
Little Red Book
, and fainting when Mao stepped out on the Forbidden City’s walls to wave.

“Mao said we should oust the four olds—ideas, culture, customs, habits—and it was as though a hurricane hit the city. The whole country went crazy. People decided that red lights should mean go and green lights should mean stop. You could see accidents at almost every corner. For centuries, Chinese women had prided themselves on the length of their hair. But now the Red Guard tramped through the streets, stopped women at random, and chopped off their hair. They decided to rename everything—streets, people, schools, restaurants—to
hong
this,
hong
that, red this, red that. Old friends became Red Army or Red Peony, streets became Red Peace Way or Red Road. I kept my name, for I was Liu Hulan.”

“I want to know about the bankbooks,” he demanded. “I want to know how you’re connected to the Rising Phoenix.”

She ignored his outburst. “Anyone who was considered feudal, old, or foreign was persecuted,” she went on. “Doctors and artists were marched through the streets wearing dunce caps and placards outlining their defects. They were beaten, humiliated, thrown in jail. Managers in offices sat through struggle meetings where the workers accused them of being capitalist roaders, reactionaries, foreign spies, and renegades. Everywhere you went, people were spit on, bit, hit, lectured, humiliated, sent to work camps or jail for imagined crimes. Teachers were know-nothings. Students wrote
dazibao
, big character posters, criticizing their teachers as bourgeois, as backward, as running dogs of capitalism. Soon there were no more teachers, and by the end of the Cultural Revolution, seventy-seven million students had lost out on their educations.”

She stopped speaking as she relived the memories.

“The past has nothing to do with
this
, Hulan.”

“But it has everything to do with
us
. That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it?” She sighed deeply, then said, “I remember the night the Red Guard came to this neighborhood for the first time. I was ten years old, still too young to be in the Red Guard myself. They called all the neighbors into the street and selected Madame Zhang and her husband for criticism. I didn’t know much about Mr. Zhang, except that at New Year’s he always used to give me some good-luck money and a little candy and that he used to have tea with my father in the courtyard under the jujube tree. But the Red Guard knew a lot! They knew that Mr. Zhang was an intellectual, one of the very worst in the ‘stinking ninth category’ of people. We all stood there like sheep as the Red Guard plundered the Zhang home. They threw his books in a pile and set fire to them. They brought out the family’s ancestor scrolls and tossed them on the blaze.”

She wiped a hand across her eyes as if to erase the images.

“The whole time, they were screaming that Mr. Zhang was a monster, a cow, a snake demon. Pretty soon the neighbors were yelling, too. People were thinking, If I don’t play along, the Red Guard will come to my house tomorrow night. Someone shouted, ‘Zhang is never generous to us. He always hoards his good fortune.’ Our next-door neighbor cried out, ‘He reads too many books, but not anymore!’ His wife joined in next. ‘We condemn you and your wife forever!’ I can still see the way the orange light from the flames flickered across the faces of my neighbors. I remember the intense scowls of the Red Guard. How do I explain this? Their faces were twisted in exultation. I remember, too, Madame Zhang. We, her neighbors, had betrayed her.”

Hulan walked to the window and looked out on the courtyard. “I don’t know who dealt the first blow, but soon the Red Guards were beating old man Zhang. I can still see him lying on the ground, the clubs and sticks hitting his limp body. I can hear the chants of encouragement from our neighbors to ‘smash his dog head.’ And the look on Madame Zhang’s face when she realized that her husband was dead? I will take that to my grave.”

“But you had nothing to do with those things,” David said, still fighting his anger. “You were only a child.”

She turned to face him. “No, I was yelling with the rest of them.” She looked away again. “Let me tell you what happened in school. You already heard what the others told you. I called Teacher Zho a pig ass. I said so many things that soon Teacher Zho was crying. Imagine a man like that, educated, crying because of a ten-year-old! But I didn’t stop there. I didn’t stop until Teacher Zho went home and never came back.”

David walked to her side.

“This whole time,” she said, “our family was protected.”

“Why?” he asked. He was becoming engrossed in her story.

“Because my father was high in the government, working at the Ministry of Culture and still within Mao’s inner circle.”

David stared into the courtyard with her.

“In 1970, when I was twelve, my parents finally allowed me to go to the countryside,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much I wanted to do that. I wanted to help reform society, exterminate the disparity between the countryside and the cities. I wanted to ‘learn from the peasants.’ I was only twelve. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I was swept up in the tide.”

When David and Hulan had lived together, he had longed for the moment she would finally reveal herself to him. Now that that time was here, he had a bad feeling about it. “You don’t have to say any more, Hulan,” he said softly.

She cocked her head and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “You wanted the truth and I’m telling it to you. I ended up at the Red Soil Farm. The idea was to turn infertile soil into rich farmland. We all got up before dawn. We plowed, we planted soybeans, we watered each stalk by hand. When harvesttime came, day after day we bent our backs and swung our scythes. I learned how to weave baskets, how to castrate baby pigs, how to pluck and gut ducks, how to carry water two miles, how to cook for a hundred people at a time. We all ate the same poor rations—rice porridge with preserved vegetables for breakfast, rice with a few stringy vegetables for lunch, rice and more vegetables for dinner, maybe a yam if we were lucky.”

“You must have been homesick.”

“We all learned how to pretend we didn’t miss our families, movie theaters, parties for high officials, clean clothes, hot water, yes, even our teachers.”

She paced to the stove and opened the grate. “I wasn’t content with working twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days,” she recalled as she dropped a few chunks of coal into the fire. “I wanted to be an inspiration like my namesake. So at night, instead of resting or reading my
Little Red Book
or gossiping with the others, I helped plan struggle meetings. Class struggle, even at the Red Soil Farm, was unavoidable. Oh, we attacked people for all sorts of things: wearing a white ribbon in your hair instead of a red one, having a mother or father or third aunt who had traveled to America once, being reticent about criticizing others, snoring and keeping your cabin mates awake, having sex—ah, this was the worst! And I tell you, I was steadfast in my criticisms. I never looked the other way.”

“Then Zai came for you,” he said, remembering what Nixon had told him.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “One day, two years later, he came to get me. He wasn’t the section chief then. No, he worked at the Ministry of Culture with my father. You wouldn’t know it to look at him now, but in those days Uncle Zai was very powerful, very strong. My father worked under him.”

She fell silent again and walked back to David’s side. By now, he knew she had to finish this. All he could do was encourage her. “How did things change?”

“In those days, it didn’t matter how much money or
guanxi
you had,” she answered. “When your time came, they would get you. It was the responsibility of the masses to drive out bad examples. Chairman Mao relied on people like me to pull weeds from the field. All this Uncle Zai explained to me as we drove to the station and then took the train two days back to Beijing. By the time we got home, I was prepared for what I had to do.”

“And you’d been away how long?”

“Two years. I was fourteen and it was spring.” Her eyes roamed the desolate garden as she said, “In a couple of months Beijing will be a wild burst of color. The cherry trees will be dripping pink blossoms. Yellow daffodils will grow in the parks. Everywhere you look is green, green, green. But I didn’t notice a thing. I was blinded by duty and fortitude.”

“What happened?”

“Mr. Zai drove me here. The neighbors were waiting for us. At the time I didn’t stop to consider how they knew we would be coming. I just thought, Ah, they are here to help in the struggle meeting. My father was brought out of the house by two of our neighbors and escorted to the middle of a huge circle. I didn’t run to him. I didn’t kiss him or hug him. Do you remember in court how Spencer Lee kept his eyes to the ground? This is what my father did, and every time he tried to lift his eyes to look at me one of the guards hit him on the back of the head with a club. Blood ran down my father’s head, soaking his shirt.”

Hulan pulled the kimono’s silk tight around her and started to weep as she recounted how Zai, her father’s boss, had taken command and began addressing the neighbors.

“He said, ‘Old Liu here has worked in the Ministry of Culture for many years now, but he has not performed as a good revolutionary might. He has not thought of the people. His position—to hire and supervise movie productions—is one of trust. But he has betrayed that trust by allowing degenerate and immoral films to be made. When his comrades tell him that he has erred, he does not make self-criticism or correct his ways. Instead, he sends those bourgeois films out into the countryside to corrupt the masses. At the Ministry of Culture, we know this can’t be his only crime, and we call on you, his neighbors, and Liu Hulan, his daughter, to help this man see his heinous ways. Only through confession will he be able to cleanse himself. We need your help.’”

“And your neighbors gave it.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, then shifted to a strident tone: “‘Liu keeps his background a secret, but some of us remember the decadent ways of his family!’” She changed her voice again: “‘They were landowners—the worst class,’ said another. ‘We can all thank the Great Helmsman that they’re dead now.’ Then Madame Zhang stepped forward and asked, ‘But what about
this
Liu?’”