Katherine (26 page)

By evening I was registering at the Party secretary’s office, a wooden house that carried the sound of the wind’s whistle. The Party boss told me that he had just been appointed to the job. He was a sixty-five-year-old man named Lao Guener—Old Woodstick. His Mao jacket was patched with different-colored cloth. He said he had received my dossier from the Shanghai Party office and he knew who I was. If I didn’t have anything more to explain, he would just assign me to a tent with two other female workers. I
asked if there were bad things written about me in the dossier so I would know what I had to explain. He said he couldn’t possibly tell me, it was against Party law.

“The past is not that important, Chairman Mao once taught us,” Lao Guener said, his breath smelling strongly of tobacco. “What’s important is how you behave from now on. Everybody’s got a pair of eyes. I believe what I see. So my point is don’t worry about what’s in your dossier.”

As he showed me to my tent, I asked him about some of my ex-workmates. Lao Guener told me that with the Central Bureau’s policy change of 1980, all city youths were allowed to leave. Overnight, thousands of people packed up and left. The only ones who stayed were local peasants, the city youths who had married locals and had children (their children were not allowed to go to the cities), and ex-criminals who were too ashamed to go home. Elephant Fields had also been used as a rehabilitation camp.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Lao Guener said proudly. “Look at this city of tents. It reminds me of my days as a Red Army soldier. This way the revisionists will never be able to corrupt our proletarian spirit.”

As I unpacked, the smell of dynamite once again overwhelmed me. My tentmates were local peasants. They were illiterate and spoke a dialect I couldn’t understand. We looked at each other like birds. They showed me the nearest path to the pond for water.

I shut down all my senses and worked like a machine. We slept in rows of tents and went to work wherever the job took us. The workers sang, “The sky is my blanket and the rocky ground my bed.” I went to work dressed in stars and came back to the tent carrying the moon on my head. After the first week my muscles began to ache. My chest hurt when I coughed or took a shit. The fifty-pound hammer once again became my only companion.

I tried to find traces of the life I had lived here before. The riverbank where I had my miscarriage had dried up. The bushes nearby were gone. Only the sky was the same, gray as a dead person’s skin.

We melted ice cubes to cook food. There was no place to shower. My skin flaked like an animal’s in the desert. When my body itched, I would rub my back against a wall like a bear.

*   *   *

I
made fifty yuan a month and sent twenty-five to a village nanny who had been taking care of Little Rabbit for me. The nanny lived twenty miles away from me.

I’d played tricks to get Little Rabbit out of the orphanage. I figured that after Katherine was gone, Mr. Han couldn’t care less about what happened to Little Rabbit. So I faked papers that convinced the headmistress of the orphanage that the case against Katherine had been mishandled and I stuffed her pockets with money.

She said, “No! I cannot take any money from you.”

“What about donations?” I asked.

She nodded hesitantly.

“Then consider these two hundred yuan a donation.”

Little Rabbit was released to me. I asked the headmistress what had happened to the certificate of adoption that had been prepared for Katherine. She said she didn’t know what to do with the document, but wasn’t sure she should give it to me. I said I just wanted to keep it, I would not show it to anybody.

“You have a very nice watch,” she said.

I took off my watch. “It’s yours.” Again she didn’t want to take it, and again I called it a donation. She took the watch and gave me the certificate.

*   *   *

M
y life was once again empty. During the day I worked with dynamite. At night I played the tapes Katherine left me on her Walkman. Her poem lay under my pillow. Although I tried to live up to her image of a “goddess in armor,” I couldn’t delude myself that life could change if only my will stayed strong. I imagined Katherine’s life in America. I imagined her in a car and wondered how it felt to ride in a car.

I was attacked by nightmares—the most frightening was one in which Katherine had forgotten us. I woke up thinking, She was a foreigner, after all. She’s getting on with her life. Maybe she’d adopted children from other countries or got married and was thinking about having children of her own.

*   *   *

T
hree months had passed, and it felt like thirty years. In the absence of hope, insanity set in. One day I was boiling water on a gasoline stove outside my tent. The wind suddenly changed direction and the tent caught fire. My tentmates told me I stood still, watching the fire chew up the tent. I was shocked at myself afterward. If my tentmates hadn’t been there, I would have let the fire keep burning. I knew I would have. I wouldn’t have done a thing.

*   *   *

L
ittle Rabbit was my only link to sanity. She had grown taller and had two pigtails. The village nanny and her family were kind to her. The nanny had been trying to correct bad habits she had developed at the orphanage, like peeing or shitting wherever she happened to be. It amazed me to hear her talk like a normal person with a voice. She was Katherine’s miracle. She told me that she wanted to look like Katherine when she grew up.

“I am going to eat a lot so I can have a
pe-gue
as big as my mama’s, even bigger,” she said seriously, her hands making the shape of buttocks in the air. She had a good imagination too. She
would describe to me how a fly was trying to steal the crackers she was eating.

One afternoon as I sat chatting with the nanny, it began to rain outside. Little Rabbit climbed up on a chair and watched rain drip off the window frame. She was quiet for a long time, then all of a sudden, she stretched out her arms toward the sky and said, “Stop crying! Why are you crying?
Nao-mee-bee.
” Shame on you. Then she jumped off the chair and came to sit on my lap. She asked me why the sky was crying. I didn’t answer her. I was thinking about Katherine.

After her nap, Little Rabbit was still thinking about the crying sky. She said to me, “When I was sleeping, the rain came to cry in my body. I said, ‘No! It’s bad to cry.’ The rain got mad and made me pee in my bed.
Nao-mee-bee.
”

Katherine was missing so much.

*   *   *

T
he mailman became the object of my secret obsession. He came once a week on a tractor. When he called out the names on the packages and envelopes he delivered was a time of hope and disappointment. I accumulated countless disappointments, but every week I still had a little hope.

The first day of the fourth month since my arrival, Katherine’s first letter arrived. It came through Jim. He sealed her letter in a Chinese envelope and sent it on to me. My heart zigzagged in my chest when I opened the envelope. “It’s her writing, her touch,” I heard myself murmur. I ran until I exhausted myself. In tears, I lay on my back in the field. I kissed the letter over and over. Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, I called.

She wrote that she had corresponded with Jim the minute she landed in America to make sure that it would work. At first the letters came back marked “return to sender,” but recently the letters
got through. She guessed it was because there was more and more business communication between the two countries; it was impossible for the Chinese government to spy on every private letter. She said she was working as an associate professor in the history department of a California college and she was well. She’d told her family and friends about me and Little Rabbit and she believed that we would meet again. She asked how I was doing and said she was missing me and Little Rabbit to pieces.

I tried to write back, but it was a hard letter to compose. What should I write about? My life as a prisoner? The development of my joint problems? How my blisters bled every night? The pain of my dry, peeling skin? How the food tasted like sand and how I peed and shit like a mountain goat on rocks?

I decided to write about Little Rabbit, telling her about the child’s dreams and way of talking. I could hear Katherine laughing. How I missed her laugh! I avoided talking about myself because I didn’t want to upset her. Katherine would have a good idea of what kind of life I led at Elephant Fields anyway.

I copied the letter onto a clean sheet and placed it beneath my pillow. I wrote Jim’s address on the envelope. The next morning before work I went to the local post office. The postal clerk asked me if the letter carried any urgent message because the mail was only collected from this box once a month. The next closest box was six miles away, but the mail was picked up once a week. I ran to the other post office and mailed the letter off.

In her return letter Katherine wrote that she had been screaming for joy for three days. Hearing from me made her feel like she had woken up from a coma. She told me she had been closely studying China’s changing role in the world. She wrote that there were over fifty thousand Chinese students in the United States and she was investigating how they had made it over.

“You didn’t tell me anything about your life at Elephant Fields,” she wrote. “I can figure it out for myself. I can feel your pain just like I can feel your joy. I think of you every day . . .”

*   *   *

I
went to work carrying Katherine’s letter. The explosions of dynamite sounded exciting. For the first time I enjoyed the grand scene of millions of tiny stones raining down after the blast. Also for the first time I paid attention to Lao Guener’s monthly progress report, which said that our division had produced the best rocks for building roads. We’d been named the “model labor team” of Elephant Fields.

I went to visit Little Rabbit one evening and told her that her mother had written. She widened her eyes and all of a sudden threw a temper tantrum. She smashed her rice bowl on the floor and said I was lying to her. Her mother had forgotten to pick her up as she had promised.

I held Little Rabbit tightly. I didn’t know what to say.

I wrote to Katherine again and reported Little Rabbit’s disappointment.

“Every morning I wake up thinking to myself, I’ve got to get Little Rabbit out!” she wrote. “No one ever said giving birth was easy. No one is going to keep my child away from me, no one.”

*   *   *

A
nother three months passed. Katherine’s latest letter brought great news. She had explained my situation to the president of her school and showed him pictures of my paintings. The school had agreed to admit me to its fine arts program and would offer me a scholarship. “Now it’s time to do your part. You must get permission for you and Little Rabbit to leave. Find out how far the long road of bureaucracy stretches and be prepared for how it may
confound you. I’m still working on this on my end. Promise me you won’t give up.”

I hit my head with my fist because I couldn’t believe this was real. I looked around. Covered with dust, all the workers looked like white bears. Was this the end of my misery? I lost sleep in my excitement.

*   *   *

I
wrote to everyone I knew asking how one got permission to go to America as a student. Jim wrote with information on procedure. Big Lee and Little Lee also answered my letter, giving me tips and encouragement. Little Bird checked with one of her relatives in the city foreign affairs office and sent applications for passports for me and Little Rabbit. I drew up a statement of purpose and presented it to the local Party boss as Jim instructed.

I waited for Lao Guener’s response to my letter. Every waking second was spent waiting. A couple of times I lit a stick of dynamite, tossed it, and drifted off in thought until a co-worker would yell at me to run.

Finally, two weeks after I had submitted the letter of intent, Lao Guener called me into his office at lunchtime. I brought along a dirt-colored canvas bag that contained ten cartons of cigarettes I bought with Katherine’s money. I would look for any chance to flatter and corrupt him. My legs were trembling. I tried to calm down, tried to look relaxed, tried not to think what would happen if he rejected my request.

Like an owl, Lao Guener squatted on his heels on a narrow wooden bench next to his tree-stump table. Half the table was piled high with Mao’s books coated with dust. Lao Guener was drinking tea and smoking a pipe. He looked tired and hadn’t bathed for a long time. His facial hair was messy, his Mao jacket greasy. He pointed for me to sit down on another bench.

I bit my lips in nervousness. My mind was boiling. Lao Guener held the same power as Mr. Han had held over my future. Was he in a bad mood this morning? Was he annoyed with me? Did he sleep well last night? Did he reread my dossier? Would he judge me on the basis of the reports Mr. Han had written or would he use his own eyes as he had said? My work at Elephant Fields was invulnerable to criticism—Lao Guener himself had praised me as a good worker—but wouldn’t he be selfish about losing a valuable laborer? Were the tobacco leaves in his pipe dry enough to keep burning and soothing his brain? Or was he going to cough and feel irritated?

I felt like a criminal on an execution platform. My life hung on the tip of Lao Guener’s tongue. One word from his mouth and my head would either dance on my shoulders or roll on the floor.

Lao Guener cleared his throat and spit flew from his mouth. He said something I could not hear. I only saw his tea-leaf-colored teeth moving. I bit down hard on my lip and concentrated on his thick cracked lips. I heard him ask me to explain what my letter was all about.

I began my long prepared speech. I said going to America to study was a way to requite the Party’s kindness. When I came back I would help Communism take a stronger hold in China with the knowledge I’d acquired.

Lao Guener interrupted me impatiently. He asked what America was. I let out a breath. At least I wouldn’t have to explain why I chose to go to such an imperialistic country. I said that America was a nation of people of many different races—and a lot of proletarians. Lao Guener asked where it was located. I replied that it was on the other side of the ocean. He was still unclear.