The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (12 page)

“It must be nice,” Wen Ch’i-mei says to woman Luo, although her gaze remains fixed on her son, “to have a husband who can read poetry. I wish I had a man like that.”

Tse-tung covers his ears with his hands. “Leave me alone,” he says. “I want to eat and go to sleep.”

Wen Ch’i-mei offers a single nod and then turns her attention back to her sewing. Distracted by Tse-tung’s strange reaction, she misses a stitch and jabs the needle into her finger. She doesn’t yelp; she merely pops the bloody fingertip into her mouth and sucks, continuing to work as if nothing happened.

The combined forces of Jen-sheng’s cruelty, Wen Ch’i-mei’s ignorance, and his wife’s mere presence have so pressurized Tse-tung that he’s sweating and feels ready to explode, like a sealed pot of boiling rice. His family is absurd and infuriating. He has to leave this town at once. He has to join the Ko-lao hui. His naive mother claims that he’ll pass the state exam and then advance in society as a scholar and clerk, but Tse-tung knows that she’s proud of
a future that will never exist. His mother knows nothing of the sweeping reforms overtaking China. She was not with Tse-tung last month when he visited his cousin Xilian at the eastern end of Shaoshan valley. Xilian had just returned from an extended study in Changsha’s Western school, and told Tse-tung that the traditional Confucian examinations had been abolished two years earlier, meaning that there would be no more free tickets for any of the humbly born in China.
I will never be a scholar!
Tse-tung wants to scream at his stupid mother.
I will never be a government clerk
! But he knows he can’t even do something as basic as inform his mother of what has happened in her own country. How could the simple woman understand that incomprehensible revolution? What could he say to her? That his entire education thus far, all the beatings he took at the miserable village school, all his tedious rote memorization of
Three Character Classic
and the standard Confucian texts, all of that, his whole life, was a complete and total waste of time and effort, because there will be no more official state exams? She’d never believe him. Every illiterate peasant in the land knows that the Confucian exam system is the staple of advancement in China, just as it’s been for well over two thousand years. Something so primal and predictable as the state exam can’t simply be abolished and gone forever. That would be like the sun forgetting to rise. No, he can’t say a word about it.

And so, instead of saying anything, Tse-tung burns with rage, furious at his ignorant ox of a mother for stupidly lording a defunct exam over her husband for power. She
has no power, and neither does he. His father is sure to get the last laugh.

It’s a perfect night in Shaoshan. A cool breeze rustles the trees and keeps the mosquitoes from biting. In the glow of the full moon, Tse-tung discerns the larger pebbles in the path before him, the swishing rice shoots to either side, and the stone bridge over the river. Silhouettes of farmhouses dot the hills along the valley. He is skipping along the path, prowling and playing a tiger, as the river gurgles beside him. A mouse scuttles across the path, but before it disappears into the greenery, Tse-tung imagines pouncing on it, snatching it up by the tail, and gobbling it down in a single bite. He growls, as deeply as possible, although he doesn’t sound much like a tiger, and then continues on towards his house on the north slope of the hill.

He is clutching
Words of Warning to an Affluent Age
, borrowed from his cousin Xilian, or rather, pressed into his hand with his cousin’s firm command that he read it. The brief passages he skimmed while sitting on a big stone by the river have already inspired him. The book is an uncompromising polemic against the British and the Japanese, how they continue their ruthless exploitation of China’s land and long-suffering people, mining the country’s wealth, selling cheap cigarettes, patrolling the Hunanese rivers in their brazen gunboats. There are descriptions of wonders scarcely imaginable: ships propelled across oceans by magical steam
engines, and small metallic devices that enable conversation between people hundreds of miles apart. Tse-tung is eager to get home and read this book from cover to cover, no matter that it’s long past dark and he’s expected to rise with the sun. He’s amazed that Xilian has learned these things at his school; it’s such a different education from the one he’s received in the village. Tse-tung would never have been such a nuisance to his teacher and tutors if they’d taught him these modern subjects instead of the same useless Confucian prescripts a thousand times over, phrases and ideas he’d already memorized and could have taught to the others. In Changsha, Xilian says, you can learn mathematics and geography, and they teach you about the governments of other countries, and you learn about the functioning of the natural world.

Tse-tung kicks a stone and listens to it splash into the river off the path. He’s tempted by the prospect of going to a modern school, not that it would be easy to get accepted. But Tse-tung also wonders if he really needs more time with books. Isn’t he already too placid and quiet, too high-voiced and feminine? No woman wants to marry another woman. He needs to develop his strength, discipline, and rigour. Sung Chiang might have been a scholarly clerk at the
yamen
, but that hero only distinguished himself when he became a man of action, a fighter on the run, a leader of radical bandits. Books are never enough.

As he marches beside the river, his gangly legs bouncing him with each step, Tse-tung oscillates between the contradictory desires of pursuing banditry and continuing his
education. He is plagued by rudimentary questions about his own character. Does he love to read or hate it? Does he want to perform
yuan fang
or not? Does he want to fight the world like an outlaw or study it like a scholar? He’s always trapped between contradictions, never has an answer, never feels complete.

He walks up the dirt path from the fish pond to his house. The windows are dark, and a cooing dove, having made its nest in the overhanging eaves, silences in honour of his approach. The gravel in the courtyard crunches under his sandals. He can smell traces of ash and boiled vegetables from dinner. Everyone must be sleeping. Tse-tung inches open the front door to prevent it from creaking.

The central room’s large table has been pushed aside to make room for a mattress on the floor. In the moonlight, Tse-tung discerns a body, curled and covered by a thin blanket. He approaches, and the person, hearing his feet, shudders and coils tighter, releasing staccato sobs that are muffled by the straw.

“Mama?”

Wen Ch’i-mei throws an arm over her head, covering her face with her bicep. Tse-tung kneels beside her and is about to lay his hand on his mother’s heaving back, but she twists away before he can touch her.

“What happened?” he asks. “Are you all right?”

“Go to bed, Tse-tung.”

Tse-tung leans back but lingers on one knee, neither standing nor sitting, neither touching her nor moving away. He is startled by his mother’s fury, never having heard such
bite in her tone. Wen Ch’i-mei squirms under the lumpy cotton blanket, as if to escape the boy’s audible breathing, and coils even tighter—like a snake consuming its own tail—but then she thrashes with frustration when the self-consumption proves impossible.

“I said go to bed, Tse-tung,” she hisses. Now she drops her arm and turns her head to attack him at full volume. “Why can’t you ever go to bed on time, you stupid boy! Can’t you see you’re not wanted? You never go to bed! You ruin everything! Go to bed! Go! Now!”

Tse-tung jumps up, tripping over his heel and stumbling, dropping
Words of Warning to an Affluent Age
. He crouches and gropes for his book, but in his haste he jams his middle finger against the leg of a chair. He yelps and shakes the screaming finger. His other hand pats around in the darkness for his lost book. He tries not to make a sound when he sneaks into his room.

Behind the closed door, Tse-tung grips
Words of Warning
with both hands. Stunned and confused, his imagination concocts fanciful explanations for his mother’s fury. His father’s anger and vindictiveness must be the product of a communicable disease, and his ceaseless spitting and frothing has spread the offending plague, so that his mother now lies stricken, racked by the disease’s characteristic fever and fury. Or no, he now thinks, his thoughts replacing one absurdity with another, maybe his mother’s crazy superstition, her insistent belief in evil spirits, which she has tried so urgently to pass on to him, has proven true. Maybe in vengeance for her child’s denial, she’s been possessed by a vampire, bent on
feeding from the primary artery between them, their sacred bond. Tse-tung stands wondering by the door.

There’s only a single small window in Tse-tung’s room, but in the strong moonlight he can see his bed. His cotton quilt and fresh pillows lie undisturbed. It takes a moment for Tse-tung to remember that this is strange. An empty bed. Every night, for ten days, unnamed woman Luo has endured her nightly torture of lying motionless, awaiting his decision to perform or not perform
yuan fang
. She has nowhere else to sleep.

The realization dawns on Tse-tung. He raises the book and covers his face, pressing his nose flat. The old miser. Never could resist a piece of fertile ground. Never one to pass over what others have left fallow. Tse-tung drops his book and remains standing by the door, unable to move his limbs.

It feels as if decades pass before he sits. Decades more pass before he lies on the unbroken surface of his bed. His stomach churns and gnaws and he farts a dozen times. His head pounds, the pain tearing around the bone and pulsing above his neck. He forgets about
Words of Warning to an Affluent Age
, but in the days to come and for the rest of his life, that book will remind him of this evening.

He lies on the bed for hours.

In his mind, Tse-tung is on the deck of a boat at sea, cast adrift. He has heard about the sea, its giant waves and its wide horizon, an endlessness that nobody can seem to describe quite to his satisfaction. He would like to be out there on the water, drifting. Although he wants the peace of a calm sea, a storm rolls over his boat in a single blink. Waves rise into
swells the size of mountains, rivalling any of those in Hunan. He’s in a valley between swells, a cavernous seascape, and now a gigantic wave is about to collapse on his boat. Tse-tung has never seen the sea, and is incapable of imagining it accurately, so the wave is a solid thing, resembling a Hunanese rock cliff, but bigger than any he’s ever seen, and it falls upon him in crumbling chunks and boulders, like an avalanche. Although the rock-wave is sure to crush him, Tse-tung stands on the deck against it. A moment before he’s engulfed, he dives into the sea and swims deep.

He can imagine what that feels like, as swimming in the ocean can’t be much different from swimming in the river. Tse-tung wills himself to breathe under water. When he rises, he discovers yet another wave crashing, again as solid as a mountain, and so he dives deeper still; there’s no limit to the power of his lungs. For hours he will fight these mountains, diving, rising, and diving again, until he’s exhausted. But the storm passes.

Tse-tung lies on his back and floats, light as a bug on the lily pond, studying the moon out the window. He feels the perfect light breeze and tropical warmth of Hunan in the middle of the night. He tells himself that no man has ever defeated these mountain-waves before. He is sure his daring will be the gossip in cities across China, and that the news will travel through the countryside, across the great river, south to Shaoshan. Everyone will learn of his accomplishment.

When the sun finally rises, and his room is engulfed in pink and yellow and light blue, he allows himself to drift in a tranquil sea, the fish gathering around him in
admiration, their fins cracking through the surface of the water. Thousands of mesmerized fish. “Here is the man who has beaten a storm by disappearing into our realm,” the fish whisper to each other, and they
k’ou-t’ou
to Tse-tung, although their gestures are halting and absurd and incomplete. Tse-tung laughs at them. “Come, come,” he says out loud. “No need for that. You’re my brothers. You are family. I will swim with you, and you can follow me forever. Yes, I’ll swim all the way to the coast, and by the time I hit land, a million of your compatriots will have followed me.”

Tse-tung waits until there’s movement in the central room before he rises. The heat of the bright day has already begun to bake the inside of the house. He doesn’t hesitate to open the door. The mattress his mother has slept on has been stashed away, and now Wen Ch’i-mei bustles in the kitchen, her pots clanging, cleaning up from breakfast. Jen-sheng eats a bowl of boiled and mashed grain at the table. Unnamed woman Luo, who stands in the middle of the room, a few paces behind his father, with her head lowered and hands clasped, allows a deep and diseased cough to rise from her lungs. Woman Luo’s cough shakes her whole body, drawing up a wad of phlegm that she promptly spits onto the ground. It’s a terrible sound, and her behaviour is shocking—a breakdown of decorum, an admission. For ten days Tse-tung has heard his wife suppress her coughs, lying in bed beside him or sewing and washing with his mother, and though that fight has caused her obvious pain—a reddening face, a neck tensed to the point of bursting—she has not once abandoned her decorum, not once let him see her behave
unattractively. And now this coarseness. He closes his eyes. He is doomed. Woman Luo is doomed.

Jen-sheng turns towards the boy and smiles slyly. “Did you sleep all right?”

Tse-tung frowns and doesn’t answer.

“I did. I slept very well. You want breakfast?”

Again, Tse-tung doesn’t answer.

“Woman,” barks Jen-sheng. “Go tell Wen Ch’i-mei to make the boy a bowl for breakfast.”

Woman Luo scurries into the kitchen with her broken steps and nearly toppling gait. Both father and son watch her depart.

“That woman,” says Jen-sheng, grinning. “She is very nice. You made a very bad mistake.” He points his chin over towards the door.