Gold Boy, Emerald Girl Part 3

"In bed," I said. Jie laughed and said she did not know I could be naughty. It was a pity that I was in his place, I said, and Jie told me not to make fun of her. I was sad that she did not understand I meant it: She and I would drift apart once we left the army; we were not close, not even real friends. I would not be the one to carry the memory of tonight for her.

I wished her boyfriend were here; I wished too that someone other than Jie were next to me, someone who one day would share the memory of the mountains with me. The wish, illogical as it was, persisted into the following days when we marched in the mountains. It was sunny in those days, the sky blue, red azaleas wild on the cliffs. If one looked up, one could see the long line of green figures ahead, disappearing and then reappearing along with the winding road, and when one quieted her steps momentarily, the singing of the companies behind would drift uphill. In the valleys, there were creeks, and sometimes a river, and there was always a lone fisherman sitting in the shade of his wide-brimmed straw hat, and a long-legged white egret nearby, neither disturbing the other. When the mountains were replaced by rolling hills we knew that we were approaching a village: First came the fields of purple milk vetch that unfolded like giant rugs, white and yellow b.u.t.terflies busying themselves in and out of the lavender blossoms; closer to the village, there were rice paddies, and water buffaloes with bare-footed boys sitting astride them; once in a while a sow would spread herself across the narrow road that led into the village, a litter of piglets pus.h.i.+ng against her. Small children chased after us, calling us Auntie Soldiers and begging for candies. Even the youngest ones knew not to eat them right away-they gingerly licked the candies and then wrapped them up so they would last days, perhaps even weeks. Feeling guiltily privileged compared to the children, we competed to offer them treats, but sooner or later we would leave them behind and march on until dusk fell, when smoke could be seen rising from the field kitchen in the valley.

Walking comforted me. I marched alone and did not join the chorus when the platoon was singing; here in the mountains, walking was the only thing required of me, and for hours I would be left undisturbed, my mind empty of troubling thoughts. Never before had I loved the world as I did then, the suns.h.i.+ne and the spring blossoms, the new trees in the woods, and the lizards in the gra.s.s. Even the daily ritual of blister popping-in our satchel each of us carried a sewing needle, and in the evenings the brigade doctor would pa.s.s out cotton b.a.l.l.s soaked in alcohol so we could sanitize the needle and pop the blisters on our feet-brought me an odd sense of liberation. There was a joy in knowing the realness of one's body: the sting when a blister was pierced; the heaviness in one's arms where the blood was pulled down by its own weight after a day of marching; the exhaustion in one's limbs lying down on the floor of a village school; the moment of uncontrollable s.h.i.+vering when one left the cl.u.s.ter of warm bodies for night-watch duty, the coldness seeping in.

TEN.

WE ARRIVED AT a town called Seven-Mile Plain after one of the longest marching days, covering thirty-two kilometers-across two rivers, over mountains, and through valleys. It was the fifteenth day, halfway through our journey, and when we limped into the town's only elementary school, the full moon was already in the eastern sky, golden with a red hue. The cooking squad had set out in the school yard one of the most extravagant meals we would have on our journey: stir-fried eels, marinated pork with snow peas, tofu and vegetable soup, and, to our surprise, a bottle of local beer for each of us. a town called Seven-Mile Plain after one of the longest marching days, covering thirty-two kilometers-across two rivers, over mountains, and through valleys. It was the fifteenth day, halfway through our journey, and when we limped into the town's only elementary school, the full moon was already in the eastern sky, golden with a red hue. The cooking squad had set out in the school yard one of the most extravagant meals we would have on our journey: stir-fried eels, marinated pork with snow peas, tofu and vegetable soup, and, to our surprise, a bottle of local beer for each of us.

In a very long toast, Major Tang summarized every day of the journey, squinting at times, trying to read the map he held. Is he already drunk? Ping mumbled, eyeing the basins of food on the ground that would soon have a layer of fat congealing on their surfaces.

A free night was announced after dinner, and we were told that bedtime would be called an hour later. That generosity, along with the beer from dinner, created a festive mood. Girls walked in twos and threes in the schoolyard, which was a sizable plot that went uphill until it reached a fence. Locust trees, decades old, surrounded it, with cl.u.s.ters of cream-colored blossoms hanging heavily between branches, their sweet fragrance growing more intense as the night progressed. Under one of the oldest trees a group of girls sang a love song from an old movie.

I walked to the school gate and was disappointed to discover that it was padlocked. Before I turned around, someone stepped from the dark shadow of the high wall and called to me.

It was a boy in uniform, and he asked me if I knew Nan. I thought of denying it, but he said he had seen me at drills and knew that I was in Nan's squad. He told me his name and which company he was from, and then asked me if I could pa.s.s a letter to Nan.

"Where are you staying?" I asked, and the boy said that his company was stationed for the night in the middle school across the street.

"And you can leave the schoolyard freely?" I said.

The boy smiled and said he had jumped the wall. I thought about him outside the school gate, waiting to catch a glimpse of Nan. When he asked me again if I could pa.s.s on his letter, I said that Nan had too many admirers to care about a letter from a stranger. The boy appeared crestfallen, and I refrained from asking him why he had never imagined other people falling in love with the girl of his dreams. "Here," he said, pa.s.sing a green bottle through the gap in the metal gate. "You can have this if you help me."

He had put a bottle of local yam liquor in my hand. Under the crudely drawn trademark of a phoenix was a line that proclaimed it the fiercest drink west of the Huai River, with a 65 percent alcohol concentration.

"I only drank a little," said the boy eagerly. "It's almost full to the top."

"What do I do with it? Pour it on my blisters?"

He seemed perplexed at my joke, and I wondered if his courage had come from the drink, which had made him as much a fool as his love had. I did not know why I had accepted his present. I had given my ration of beer to a conscript in the cooking squad-I had never touched alcohol in my life, nor had I ever seen it around our flat. I took a stroll around the schoolyard, and when I couldn't locate Nan, I sat down in the farthest corner of the yard, under an old locust tree, its bulging root the perfect seat. What dissolves one's sorrow but a good drink? What dissolves one's sorrow but a good drink? It was one of my mother's favorite quotations from an ancient poem, even though she had never touched a drop. I uncapped the bottle, wiped its mouth carefully, took a gulp, and was immediately choked to tears. It was one of my mother's favorite quotations from an ancient poem, even though she had never touched a drop. I uncapped the bottle, wiped its mouth carefully, took a gulp, and was immediately choked to tears.

After the burning sensation in my chest became less of a torture, I took another mouthful, all the while aware of my intention to pour the liquid out and discard the bottle, though I never did gather the resolution. When Lieutenant Wei approached me, much later it seemed, I recognized her footsteps. I hesitated, and did not stand up to salute her.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. "You missed the bedtime whistle."

It occurred to me that I had heard some m.u.f.fled steps, and later that the schoolyard had become quiet, but I had not once thought of my obligation to report to the cla.s.sroom for bedtime. I did not hear the whistle, I replied. I wondered if the officers were conducting a search for me; and perhaps in my daring confusion I even asked the question aloud, since Lieutenant Wei s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle from my hand and said I should be grateful that she did not report me missing. "What would happen if you reported me?" I asked. I stood up, trying to steady myself by leaning onto the tree trunk. The world seemed sharper, as if a hand had retraced the edge of everything: the moon, the dark shadows of the trees, Lieutenant Wei's frown, my bottle in her hand. "Would I be punished in any way that you think would make me repent?"

"You're drunk."

Perhaps so, I said.

"Is anything the matter?" she asked, her voice softening. "Can I help you?"

Anything the matter? I laughed and said that the trouble was, I did not know a single thing that could be called the matter the matter. How do you unravel a mess of yarn when you don't even see the yarn? I said, realizing that I must sound ridiculous.

Lieutenant Wei asked if she could have a drink. I nodded. She took a sip of the liquor, then pa.s.sed the bottle to me. Let us drink like good friends, she said. I took a gulp and poured the rest of the liquid on the root of the locust tree. "We are not meant to be friends," I said to Lieutenant Wei.

"Not for once?" she asked.

I could not tell if her tone was a pleading one. "I was not yet given a life when you were born; when I was born you were old already," I said.

"I don't understand," Lieutenant Wei said.

Of course she would not understand. When I was in elementary school, I had once discovered a handmade bookmark in one of my mother's old novels, a few lines of an ancient folk song written in my mother's neat handwriting: I was not yet given a life when you were born; when I was born you were old already. How I wish I had not come this late, but death has placed mountains I was not yet given a life when you were born; when I was born you were old already. How I wish I had not come this late, but death has placed mountains and seas between you and me and seas between you and me. I had thought, at twelve, that my mother had written out the lines for my father, and I had cried then for them, thinking that she was right, that one day death would come for my father long before it was her time. Later I realized that it was not for my father but for a married man that she had written those lines out; I did not know who the other man was, but I knew he must be younger than my father. Still, with a wife and children, and without any affection to spare for my mother, he must have been as unreachable as death would have made him.

"Why are you unhappy?" Lieutenant Wei said when I did not speak. Placing a finger under my chin, she lifted my face slightly toward the moon. "Tell me, how can we make you happy?"

I now know that it was out of innocent confidence that Lieutenant Wei asked those questions. She was twenty-four then, a sensible and happy person. There are people, I now know, who have been granted happiness as their birthright, and who, believing that every mystery in life can be solved and every pain salved, reach out with a savior's hand. I wish I had replied differently, but at eighteen, I was as blind to her kindness as she was to my revulsion at any gesture of affection. "Why don't you give me a happiness drill right at this moment?" I said. "There is nothing we can't achieve in the army, isn't that right, Lieutenant?"

The rainy season began the next day, and it rained on and off for the rest of our journey. The mountain road was muddy, and the bedrolls on our backs, despite our heavy raincoats, inevitably got damper each day, "good for nothing but cultivating mushrooms," as Nan drily observed one night. Wildflowers by the roadside drooped in the storms, but even if they had not, we would not have regained the impulse to decorate our b.u.t.tonholes with them. The officers stopped ordering us to sing, and sometimes we walked for an hour or two without talking, the only noise coming from the rustling of our raincoats, the rain falling on the tree leaves, and our footsteps in the soft mud.

I avoided Lieutenant Wei as much as she avoided me, though strangely, when we sat down in an open field at breaks, I would watch the rain fall off my visor, and hope for the chance to talk to her again. Stop being an idiot, I scolded myself; still, I found myself involuntarily searching for her when we set up camp in the evenings.

The rain stopped on May Day, and the sky lit up, the purest blue I had ever seen. We ended the marching early, at midday, and stationed ourselves in a place called Da-Wu-nirvana-an unusual name for an impoverished mountain town. There were only two days left in our journey, but before we returned to the camp, there was to be a field exercise that night. Da-Wu, once a model town, which had spent more than it could afford building intricate air-raid shelters and tunnels outside of town as preparation for the Sino-Soviet war, provided the perfect site.

We set out at eight, the third platoon to use the training site. On the way there we met the other platoon of girls, marching and singing as if returning from a most exhilarating game. The a.s.signment was simple-two squads were to face each other in a meeting engagement, and the squad leaders were to lead their soldiers to annihilate the enemies. Each of us got two rounds of ten blanks, and when we reached the entrance to a network of tunnels, Lieutenant Wei whistled, the signal to begin.

The musty tunnel, unused but by the most adventurous children perhaps, smelled sulfuric from the encounters of the previous platoons. We stumbled our way through, the flashlight of the squad leader the only light. Someone giggled when she b.u.mped into the person ahead of her, and Ping, in a loud whisper, wondered if there were rats or bats rus.h.i.+ng to find shelter from us. It was as if we were returned to our childhood for a war game in the schoolyard, and the machine guns only added to the excitement, since as children the most we could do was use a tree branch as a weapon, or shape our hands into pistols.

After fifteen minutes, we exited the tunnel and stepped into a long trench. Across the dark field we heard rustling, so our squad leader ordered us to find shooting positions in the trench. No more than five minutes later we had emptied our rounds of ammunition into the emptiness between us and our enemies, the metallic explosions shrieking in our ears and lighting up the field just long enough for us to see the smoke dispersing. What a fun game! a girl shouted before she fired the last bullet. There was clapping on the other side of the battleground in reply.

When we gathered again, Lieutenant Wei asked us to report on the battle. I killed ten and injured five, Ping yelled out, and soon it became a boisterous compet.i.tion. When the clamor quieted down, Lieutenant Wei said let me show you something, and led the platoon down a different road back to town.

We stopped at a trench on the other side of the battleground. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of fireflies twinkled, lighting up the tall, slender gra.s.ses in the trench. No one spoke. We had killed as many times as we had been killed, yet we had never been as alive as we were on that beautiful night in May.

"In memory of tonight, I'm going to ask someone to sing a song for us," Lieutenant Wei said. Many girls turned to Nan, and she handed her machine gun to the girl standing next to her. Lieutenant Wei shook her head at Nan and turned to me. "Can you sing a song for the platoon?"

I could not read Lieutenant Wei's face. "I'm not good at singing, Lieutenant," I replied.

"That is not a problem for us," Lieutenant Wei said. "All we need is for you to step up and sing."

Some of the girls gazed at me sympathetically, others were perplexed. They must have been wondering what wrong I'd committed to earn myself this punishment. When I still did not move, Lieutenant Wei raised her voice and ordered me to step out of the formation, her voice no longer patient.

At eighteen I entered the army fresh and young, and the fire-red stars on my epaulets shone onto my blossoming youth, I sang flatly. It was the first marching song we had been taught back in the fall. Lieutenant Wei ordered me to stop. "Sing us a civilian song," she said.

"I don't know any civilian songs, Lieutenant."

"Do you need me to find someone to teach you a song at this very moment, Comrade Moyan?" Lieutenant Wei said.

"I am a slow learner, Lieutenant."

"There is nothing we can't achieve in the army," Lieutenant Wei said. "We'll stay here all night waiting for you to learn a song and sing it for us, if that has to be the case."

When I began to sing again there was a ripple of unease. "It Is a Shame to Be a Lonely Person" was the song, called by Major Tang the product of a corrupt and lost generation. Halfway through I saw Jie roll her eyes, unimpressed by my foolish stubbornness; Nan watched me, puzzled. What would Professor Shan have said if she had seen me then, singing and crying in front of people who deserved neither my song nor my tears? One's fate is determined by what she is not allowed to have, rather than what she possesses: One's fate is determined by what she is not allowed to have, rather than what she possesses: Professor Shan's words came to me then, her only comment after reading me a Lawrence story called "The Fox." Professor Shan's words came to me then, her only comment after reading me a Lawrence story called "The Fox."

ELEVEN.

A MILITARY JEEP was waiting for me when we returned to the meeting hall where we had set up camp for the night. Major Tang, who was exchanging small talk with the driver, informed me that I was to leave immediately for the train station at the county seat. Three hours earlier a telegram had arrived at the camp, which the driver now produced from his pocket, the thin green slip of paper smelling of cigarette smoke. was waiting for me when we returned to the meeting hall where we had set up camp for the night. Major Tang, who was exchanging small talk with the driver, informed me that I was to leave immediately for the train station at the county seat. Three hours earlier a telegram had arrived at the camp, which the driver now produced from his pocket, the thin green slip of paper smelling of cigarette smoke. Mother pa.s.sed away please return Mother pa.s.sed away please return, sent by someone whose name I did not recognize. My father, unable to leave my mother alone, must have sent someone to the post office in his place. I imagined the stranger spelling out the message; when words of condolence were offered he must have said, thank heaven it was not his daughter who would be getting the telegram.

I brought only my satchel with me. There was no time to say farewell to anyone, as the driver had orders to make sure I caught the last night train to Beijing. We arrived just as the train was leaving the station, so the driver, ignoring my suggestion that I could spend the night in the station and catch the first train in the morning, sped down a country road that for the most part ran parallel to the train tracks until his Jeep overtook the puffing engine. At the next station, a small one with neither a waiting area nor a ticket booth, the driver insisted on waiting with me and seeing me board the train safely. The only other pa.s.senger on the platform was a dozing old man, leaning on a thick tree branch he used as a walking stick; at his feet were two heavy nylon bags and a bamboo basket. He stirred when he heard our steps. The driver asked him where he was going, but the old man, not understanding the question or perhaps too deaf to hear it, mumbled something in some local dialect before dozing off again. Soon the train arrived, and the driver helped the old man up the steps and then pa.s.sed him his bags. I went for the basket, and only then did I discover the small child, wrapped in an old blanket and sleeping inside, one finger curled under her smiling face.

I lifted the basket gingerly, and the child s.h.i.+fted her head, heaved a sigh, but did not wake. Someone-a conductor perhaps-took the basket from me. The driver said something about "the poor child," but I did not hear him clearly enough to reply. Once I boarded the train, the driver pulled the metal door and closed it behind me. When I looked at him from the window in the door, he saluted me and waited until the train began to move before putting down his hand.

I waved at him. I did not know if he could see me through the dark night and smoky window, though he did not move, standing straight and watching the train leave. When I could no longer see him I leaned against the cold metal door, the loneliness I had learned to live with all of a sudden unbearable. I did not know the driver's name, nor had I gotten a close look at his face-but for years to come I would think of his salute, a stranger's kindness always remembered because a stranger's kindness, like time itself, heals our wounds in the end.

My father looked like a very old man, his eyes hollow, his hands shaking constantly, the grief too heavy. He had turned seventy the day before my mother's death-a suicide, I had guessed at once, though he did not tell me what she had done. It was from neighbors that I found out-she had hanged herself in the bedroom. Anybody else would have broken that curtain rod with her weight, but of course your mother was so skinny, an old woman said to me, as if my mother's only misfortune was that she had never become a nicely plump woman.

"Your mother was the kindest woman in the world," my father said the night before her cremation. He was lying in bed, his head propped up by the stack of pillows my mother had used when she read. I told him to eat a little and then rest, but the noodle soup I had made for him remained untouched, and he insisted on watching me pack up my mother's side of the bedroom. Her clothes-many of them from her youth-were to be cremated with her; her collection of novels and ancient poetry I was to put into boxes and move out to the foyer. My father, like uneducated people in his generation, revered anything in print; he told me to keep the books, that I should use them as I continue my education. "She was never happy to be married to an old man, but she kept her promise."

I examined each book, hoping to find the handmade bookmark that I had once discovered. I did not know what promise my father was talking about, but I knew I need not press him for an explanation. In the past two days, he had talked more than he had for years. Stories of my mother's childhood and youth-of being the middle daughter sandwiched between many siblings and feeling neglected by her parents, of her loving books despite her parents' decision to send her to a factory as an apprentice at fifteen, of her favorite three-legged cat named Sansan, of her delight in painting her fingernails with the petals of balsams every spring, red or pink or lavender, depending on which color was blooming in her best friend's garden-all this was related to me. I wondered if my mother had told my father these stories in the early years of their marriage-but she had already been a madwoman then, so how could he have been certain that she was not just making up tales the same way she had made up her love story with a married man?

"She asked me if twenty years was enough," my father said after a moment. "Twenty years was a long time for an older man like me, I told her. So she said let's be husband and wife for twenty years. People said I was out of my mind to marry a madwoman, but you see, she was only unhappy. She did not break her promise."

I placed a romance novel on top of a pile quietly. I wondered if my mother had calculated it all out-an older man in love with her was better than an asylum or the reign of her disgraced parents and siblings-but no matter, she had returned his kindness with twenty years of a life she had no desire to live.

"Of course it's not fair for you, Moyan," my father said. "I thought twenty years enough time to bring up a child together. She did not want you at first."

"Why did she agree?"

"A child gives a marriage a future. That was what people told me. I thought when we had you she would forget that foolish deal of twenty years," my father said, his voice so low I could barely hear him. "I am sorry we haven't had much to offer you as parents."

I turned my back to my father, pretending to pick at another stack of books so he would not see my tears. Neither he nor I, in the end, had given her more reason to live than the obligation to fulfill a simple promise, though even in her maddest years, she hadn't given up the pretense that she was my birth mother. I wished Professor Shan had never told me about my adoption.

The next day my father and I saw my mother off at the funeral home. There was no memorial service for her, nor did any of her siblings come and acknowledge her departure. My father insisted on waiting by the furnace alone, so I wandered into one of the meeting halls and sat through a memorial service for a stranger whose children and grandchildren wailed when it was time for the man to go to the furnace.

On the bus ride home, my father carried the wooden box, inside of which was an ivory-colored silk bag that contained what was left of my mother. I had tried to convince him to bury her in the munic.i.p.al cemetery, but he had refused. He wanted to be buried with her on the same day, he explained to me. Not right next to her, he said, since she had fulfilled her promise and he should fulfill his of leaving her alone-but also not too far from her, he added after a moment. "I'm sorry we have to burden you," my father said when I said nothing about his request. I knew that he had guessed by then that I had found out about my adoption, as one's birth father would not have to apologize for his own last request. "You deserve a better life, but this is all we could do for you."

TWELVE.

THE PIGS would continue lying in the suns.h.i.+ne after meals until they were butchered for the farewell banquet in late July. The new gra.s.s at the shooting range would soon be tall enough for small children to play hide-and-seek in, though no children would ever know the place, where bronze bullet sh.e.l.ls that would otherwise have made thrilling toys remained undisturbed. At the exhibition drill, on an extremely hot August day, several girls fainted from standing in the sun and listening to the speeches of a general and several senior officers. Lieutenant Wei, along with other junior officers, stood in formation and saluted by the camp entrance until the last lorry carrying boys and girls eager to go home had left for the train station. While the cooking squad cleaned up the mess hall after the banquet, they sipped cheap liquor, and when they became drunk they cried and later fought among themselves. At night Lieutenant Wei walked through the barracks and picked up a few items left behind-a stamp, a ballpoint pen almost out of ink, an army-issue tiepin, golden-colored, with a red star at one end. There were other things for me to remember, details I had not seen with my eyes yet nevertheless had become part of my memory, some gathered from a chat with Nan in college, others imagined. would continue lying in the suns.h.i.+ne after meals until they were butchered for the farewell banquet in late July. The new gra.s.s at the shooting range would soon be tall enough for small children to play hide-and-seek in, though no children would ever know the place, where bronze bullet sh.e.l.ls that would otherwise have made thrilling toys remained undisturbed. At the exhibition drill, on an extremely hot August day, several girls fainted from standing in the sun and listening to the speeches of a general and several senior officers. Lieutenant Wei, along with other junior officers, stood in formation and saluted by the camp entrance until the last lorry carrying boys and girls eager to go home had left for the train station. While the cooking squad cleaned up the mess hall after the banquet, they sipped cheap liquor, and when they became drunk they cried and later fought among themselves. At night Lieutenant Wei walked through the barracks and picked up a few items left behind-a stamp, a ballpoint pen almost out of ink, an army-issue tiepin, golden-colored, with a red star at one end. There were other things for me to remember, details I had not seen with my eyes yet nevertheless had become part of my memory, some gathered from a chat with Nan in college, others imagined.

I did not report back to the army after my mother's cremation. On the last day of my five-day leave I sent a telegram to the camp, addressing no one and giving mental breakdown as the reason for not being able to return. I did not know what would happen to me-if, without the last two months of training, I would still be qualified to go to college in September-and I did not care enough to worry about it. My father had become a shaky old man, and the department store where he had worked for thirty years had to let him go, apologetically granting him half his salary as his pension and an expensive-looking gilded clock as a retirement present. We talked a lot at the beginning, about my mother and sometimes my childhood, but these conversations wore us out, as neither of us was used to talking, and in the end my father replaced my mother in their bedroom, lying in bed all day long; I wandered my days away till sunset as my mother had once done.

A few weeks after I had come home, I was standing by the roadside and watching workers brush the trunks of elm trees with white paint mixed with pesticide when Professor Shan approached me. "I see that you're back," she said. "Come with me."

I had not been to Professor Shan's flat since I had left her, yet from the look of things, time had stopped in her world.

"I heard about your mother's pa.s.sing," Professor Shan said and signaled me to sit down on her bed. "Is your father doing all right?"

A few days earlier my father had asked me if I thought he had been responsible for my mother's death-would she have had a longer life if he had not married her? he asked me, and I a.s.sured him that my mother, despite her unhappiness, loved him as she never loved anyone else. My father looked at me sadly and did not speak-he must have been thinking of the married man who had never returned my mother's love, so I showed him the bookmark I had saved from her books. What does the poem mean? he asked after reading the lines many times, and I said it was a love song from a younger woman to an older man.

"Love leaves one in debt," Professor Shan said. I nodded, though I wondered whether she meant that my father was forever paying back his debt to my mother because of his love for her, or that being loved and unable to love back had made her indebted to him. "Best if you start free from all that, do you understand?"

I had read enough love stories to be interested in one more, I said, and Professor Shan seemed satisfied by my answer. After that I resumed my daily visit to her flat, and I continued for the next twelve years. At the beginning she read to me, and later, when her eyesight deteriorated, I took over, though she was always the one to tell me which book to read. She never asked me about my life in the army, and she showed little interest in the civilian life I'd led in college, and later as a schoolteacher. When I reached marriageable age, people began to press me, subtly at first and later less so, saying that a young woman's best years were brief, saying that I was becoming less desirable by the day, like a fresh lychee that had not found a buyer in time. Professor Shan must have suspected all this talk but, as always, she refused to let the mundane into her flat. Instead, we read other people's stories, more real than our own; after all, inadequate makers of our own lives, we were no match for those masters.

My father died less than a year after my mother, and against his wish I buried their urns next to each other. I visit them every year on my birthday, my only trip outside the district where I live and teach. My mother fell in love at an early age, my father late; they both fell for someone who would not return their love, yet in the end their story is the only love story I can claim, and I live as proof of that story, of one man's offering to a woman from his meager existence, and of her returning it with her entire adult life.

I think of visiting Professor Shan's grave in Shanghai, too, but I know I will never do it, as the location is kept from me by her children. In the last days of her life they came back from America to arrange the funeral and the sale of her flat. They were alarmed by my friends.h.i.+p with their mother, and before she was transferred from the geriatric ward to the morgue they told me that I was wrong if I thought they would give me a share of the inheritance.

I laughed and said that had never been my intention, though I could see they did not believe me. Why would they, when life to them was a simple transaction between those who owe and those who own? Before she entered the hospital, Professor Shan had watched me pack up her books. Take them home before my children sell them to the recycling station, she told me, and I packed them all, including the book of D. H. Lawrence's stories that I had once stolen from her. The summer after I left the army, Lieutenant Wei had mailed it to me, along with my half-empty suitcase, with the bar of Lux soap wrapped in my civilian clothes, and a letter expressing her condolences. "I wish we had met under different circ.u.mstances," the letter concluded.

I did not write to thank Lieutenant Wei for sending the suitcase, nor did I reply, a few months later, when she sent another letter, saying that she and the other two platoon officers had been officially invited to visit my college, and she would love to see me in my city. After that there was one more letter, and then a wedding invitation, and now, twenty years later, a funeral notice. Professor Shan would have approved of my silence, though I wonder if she was wrong to think that without love one can be free. What was not understood when I was younger is understood now. Lieutenant Wei's persistence in seeking my friends.h.i.+p came from the same desire as Professor Shan's to make me a disciple. Both women had set their hearts on making a new person, though, unlike Professor Shan, Lieutenant Wei was too curious and too respectful to be a successful hijacker of other people's lives. Sometimes I wonder if I would have become her friend had I not met Professor Shan. Perhaps I would have subjected myself to her will as I had Professor Shan's, and I would have become a happier person, falling in love with a suitable man, because that is what Lieutenant Wei would have considered happiness. But what is the point of talking about the past in this haphazard way? Kindness binds one to the past as obstinately as love does, and no matter what you think of Professor Shan or Lieutenant Wei, it is their kindness that makes me indebted to them. For that reason, I know Lieutenant Wei will continue coming to me in my dreams, as Professor Shan's voice still reads to me when I sit in my flat with one of her books in hand.

I now memorize ancient poems from my mother's books. I reread the romantic stories and never tire of them. They are terrible stories, terribly written, yet they are about fate, a kinder fate that unites one with her lover despite hards.h.i.+ps and improbability-and they never fail to give me a momentary hope, as they must have given my mother years ago, as if all will be well in the end.

But it is Professor Shan's collection that I truly live with, d.i.c.kens and Hardy and Lawrence, who once saw me as a young girl and who will one day see me as an old woman. The people who live out their lives in those books, like their creators, are not my people, and I wonder if it is this irrelevance that makes it easy for me to wander among them, the same way that my not being related to my parents by blood makes it easy for me to claim their love story as mine.

The girls I served with in the army must be mothers and wives by now. I imagine them continuing with their daily lives, unaware of Lieutenant Wei's death: Ping, in a warm coc.o.o.n, once provided by her father, now by her husband; Jie, married but perhaps keeping a lover from time to time; and our squad leader, the most militant eighteen-year-old of us all, providing a warm home for her family, for even a militant girl could turn out to be a loving wife and mother. I have never forgotten any person who has come into my life. As I am on my way to work this morning, I see Nan's face on a TV screen in a shop window. I watch her through the gla.s.s pane-I cannot hear what the program is saying, but by the way she smiles and talks, you can tell she is an important person. I study her, still pet.i.te and beautiful, still able to pa.s.s for a young woman in a choir. For a moment my heart mourns for the pa.s.sing of time as it has never mourned the deaths of my parents, or Professor Shan, or Lieutenant Wei. If I close my eyes I can hear again Nan's beautiful voice, singing "The Last Rose of Summer" at the shooting range, a random act of kindness that will continue living on in the memory of someone who is a stranger to her now.

A Man Like Him

THE GIRL, UNLIKE most people photographed for fas.h.i.+on magazines, was not beautiful. Moreover, she had no desire to appear beautiful, as anyone looking at her could tell, and for that reason Teacher Fei stopped turning the pages and studied her. She had short, unruly hair and wide-set eyes that glared at the camera in a close-up shot. In another photo, she stood in front of a bedroom door, her back to the camera, her hand pus.h.i.+ng the door ajar. A bed and its pink sheet were artfully blurred. Her black T-s.h.i.+rt, in sharp focus, displayed a line of white printed characters: most people photographed for fas.h.i.+on magazines, was not beautiful. Moreover, she had no desire to appear beautiful, as anyone looking at her could tell, and for that reason Teacher Fei stopped turning the pages and studied her. She had short, unruly hair and wide-set eyes that glared at the camera in a close-up shot. In another photo, she stood in front of a bedroom door, her back to the camera, her hand pus.h.i.+ng the door ajar. A bed and its pink sheet were artfully blurred. Her black T-s.h.i.+rt, in sharp focus, displayed a line of white printed characters: MY FATHER IS LESS OF A CREATURE THAN A PIG OR A DOG BECAUSE HE IS AN ADULTERER MY FATHER IS LESS OF A CREATURE THAN A PIG OR A DOG BECAUSE HE IS AN ADULTERER.

The girl was nineteen, Teacher Fei learned from the article. Her parents had divorced three years earlier, and she suspected that another woman, a second cousin of her father's, had seduced him. On her eighteenth birthday, the first day permitted by law, the daughter had filed a lawsuit against him. As she explained to the reporter, he was a member of the Communist Party, and he should be punished for abandoning his family, and for the immoral act of having taken a mistress in the first place. When the effort to imprison her father failed, the girl started a blog and called it A Declaration of War on Unfaithful Husbands.

"What is it that this crazy girl wants?" Teacher Fei asked out loud before reaching the girl's answer. She wanted her father to lose his job, she told the reporter, along with his social status, his freedom, if possible, and his mistress for sure; she wanted him to beg her and her mother to take him back. She would support him for the rest of his life as the most filial daughter, but he had to repent-and, before that, to suffer as much as she and her mother had.

What malice, Teacher Fei thought. He flung the magazine across the room, knocking a picture frame from the bookcase and surprising himself with this sudden burst of anger. At sixty-six, Teacher Fei had seen enough of the world to consider himself beyond the trap of pointless emotions. Was it the milkman, his mother asked from the living room. Milkmen had long ago ceased to exist in Beijing, milk being sold abundantly in stores now; still, approaching ninety, she was s.n.a.t.c.hed from time to time by the old fear that a neighbor or a pa.s.serby would swipe their two rationed bottles. Remember how they had twice been fined for lost bottles, she asked as Teacher Fei entered the living room, where she sat in the old armchair that had been his father's favorite spot in his last years. Teacher Fei hadn't listened closely, but it was a question he knew by heart, and he said yes, he had remembered to pick up the bottles the moment they were delivered. Be sure to leave them in a basin of cold water so the milk does not turn, she urged. He stood before her and patted her hands, folded in her lap, and rea.s.sured her that there was no need to worry. She grabbed him then, curling her thin fingers around his. "I have nothing to say about this world," she said slowly.

"I know," Teacher Fei said. He bent down and placed her hands back in her lap. "Should I warm some milk?" he asked, though he could see that already she was slipping away into her usual reverie, one that would momentarily wash her mind clean. Sometimes he made an effort, coaxing her to walk with baby steps to exercise her shrinking muscles. A few years ago, the limit of her world had been the park two blocks down the street, and later the stone bench across the street from their flat; now it was their fifth-floor balcony. Teacher Fei knew that in time he would let his mother die in peace in this flat. She disliked strangers, and he couldn't imagine her in a cold bed in a crowded hospital ward.

Teacher Fei withdrew to the study, which had been his father's domain until his death. His mother had long ago stopped visiting this room, so Teacher Fei was the one who took care of the books on the shelves, airing the yellowing pages twice a year on the balcony, but inevitably some of the books had become too old to rescue, making way for the fas.h.i.+on magazines that Teacher Fei now purchased.

The black-clad girl taunted him from the magazine lying open on the floor. He picked her up and carefully set her on the desk, then fumbled in the drawer for an inkpot. Much of the ink in the bottle had evaporated from lack of use, and few of the brushes in the bamboo container were in good shape now. Still, with a fine brush pen and just enough ink on the tip, he was able to sketch, in the margin of the page, a scorpion, its pincers stabbing toward the girl's eyes. It had been six years since he retired as an art teacher, nearly forty since he last painted out of free will. Teacher Fei looked at the drawing. His hand was far from a shaking old man's. He could have made the scorpion an arthropod version of the girl, but such an act would have been beneath his standards. Teacher Fei had never cursed at a woman, either in words or in any other form of expression, and he certainly did not want to begin with a young girl.