The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (11 page)

Wu is focused on his planting and doesn’t see the boy coming. He only glances up when he hears the suck of Tse-tung’s feet in mud. They nod at each other, Wu seemingly indifferent to the youth’s presence, and certainly not about to start mocking him openly for his failure with woman Luo. That’s good. Tse-tung will show Wu that he’s a real man, as capable of working the fields as any stoic labourer. He unwraps a wet cloth around his first batch of rice shoots and withdraws a small spade. He digs a hole in the mud and stuffs the shoot inside. Wu will know all about the nearest Ko-lao hui lodges in Hunan province, as easily half the labourers in the region are members of that ancient and rebellious society, which has long opposed the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty, and is clearly modelled after the bandits in
Water Margin
.

The landowner’s eldest son and the hired labourer Wu work side by side, each maintaining an efficient pace so as not to be called lazy by the other. Drops of perspiration slip from their foreheads and dissipate in the pool below. Their feet slosh in the mud. The rhythm of planting the rice lulls them both. The humidity is so thick that their repeated motions seem to carve ruts in the air. Tse-tung can’t bring himself to ask Wu his question, and yet, if he doesn’t, he’ll stay trapped in Shaoshan forever, as rooted in the earth as the rice shoots he’s planting. The work pains his back, but it’s also peaceful and cleansing. Tse-tung counts his shoots
and realizes he’s planting faster than Wu. That’s a good sign; someone who works this quickly might someday become a leader of the Ko-lao hui, just like Sung Chiang. Tse-tung might succeed if he leaves Shaoshan and joins the bandits.

“When’s your next trip to Hsiangtan?” he asks suddenly, without stopping.

Wu flashes him a concerned look. “After planting season.”

“And then again in the fall?”

Wu stands and scowls, studying the boy. Tse-tung knows that every year, after the harvest and milling, Wu and another temporary worker pack the ox cart with Mao Jen-sheng’s surplus grain and lug it along the bumpy road to Hsiangtan, to be sold on the river for a tidy profit. Tse-tung has been managing the family’s accounts for the past two seasons. He knows the routine. So what’s he doing asking this question?

“I go every fall,” says Wu.

“You know many people there?”

Wu tilts his hat, wipes his brow with his sleeve, and resumes planting at a regular pace. “No,” he says, peering into the muck. “Very few.”

“A lot of workers arrive at that time, don’t they? All selling their masters’ rice?”

“I stay two nights, then come right home.”

“Do you know any Ko-lao hui there?” Tse-tung presses.

Wu stands abruptly, a rice shoot in one hand and a rusted spade in the other. “I don’t know anyone,” he says. “I keep away from Ko-lao hui.”

“But there must be lodges in Hsiangtan. Is it difficult to join one?”

Now Wu steps back in the mud, waving his arms. “I said I know nothing about that. Nothing at all! They’re bad people, those bandits. I pay the
likin
tax for your family and I bring your money home, don’t I? You’ve seen the books. I don’t smuggle and I don’t steal. I don’t want any trouble with Ko-lao hui. You understand? So you tell your father that.”

Wu resumes planting with a flat expression, as if he had never backed up in terror. The only sign of his distress is that he’s working faster, with performed concentration. Tse-tung blushes and tries his best not to alter his pace. The two men stuff rice shoots in their parallel rows. It was stupid to ask Wu about the bandits. Besides the fact that he’s acquired no new information, now there’s a risk of the labourer gossiping about the eldest Mao son to all his friends, telling everyone in town that impotent Tse-tung is interested in joining Ko-lao hui, news which would certainly get back to Jen-sheng and result in a beating worse than any he’s ever known.

But the hired labourer Wu is not so concerned with Tse-tung’s ambitions. He couldn’t care less about the boy’s rebellion against his landowning family, and only wonders who gave him away. Could it have been one of his blood brothers, some smuggler savagely tortured into a full confession by the Manchu authorities? It is useless to ask the questions; there are too many potential traitors. Wu knows countless bandits, and they know him, as he is a long-standing brother of one of the largest and most active Ko-lao hui lodges in Hunan. Each year, during his semi-annual visits to Hsiangtan, he engages in elaborate tea rituals with his fellow members, exchanging secret information by hand gestures,
cup positions, and other hidden signs. He sells Jen-sheng’s surplus grain exclusively to Ko-lao hui merchants, since they have connections to smugglers along the Xiang river all the way north to Changsha, and thus can avoid paying the hated
likin
tax, which funds reactionary militias aligned with the Manchu government against the Han majority. Wu pockets the money he saves.

Two years ago, on the orders of his lodge’s chief dragonhead, Wu embarked on the longer journey to Lu-k’ou during the off-season to help run one of the lucrative gambling houses used to fund the bandits’ revolutionary activities. He offered his services as a spy on that trip, informing numerous lodge members of the Mao family’s growing wealth, and of Jen-sheng’s cruelty to Shaoshan’s starving peasants during the famine of 1906, how his master denied them grain in favour of selling the surplus. And on yet another occasion, Wu participated in the roadside robbery of a rich clerk, a plot that involved spiking the porters’ wine, like a chapter from
Water Margin
. The labourer knows that any of the dozens of people involved in those activities could have given him away.

Rather than worrying about Tse-tung’s adolescent tiffs with his father, Wu is wondering what will happen to him now, and to his wife and three little boys in the next village. Will he be fired, or something worse—arrested for treason and publicly executed? Wu wants to drop his sack of shoots and sprint out of Shaoshan valley, but instead concentrates on maintaining his composure while he works.

Hours pass in silent labour. Tse-tung plants the last of his rice shoots in the late afternoon. His lower back throbs and
his lanky legs ache. He might even sleep tonight. He walks with a swishing gait along the dry dirt path between drenched fields. His family’s house has been painted a warm yellow, illuminated in the strong golden sunlight and contrasting strikingly with the thick greenery on the hill behind it. Viridescent shoots grow tall in adjacent paddies. There’s an enticing scent of hibiscus in the air. The fish pond, sprouting lily pads and open white flowers, is overrun with croaking frogs, audible from a distance. It’s deceiving, how peaceful his home appears. Tse-tung shuffles into the courtyard and steps across the threshold.

“Where have you been?” his father asks.

Tse-tung stands in the doorway, clasping his sack and his hat, his pupils yet to adjust to the diminished interior light. He sees only his father’s silhouette at the table.

“You haven’t done a second of work today, have you?”

The room comes into focus, exposing Jen-sheng and Hsiao, a second seasonal labourer. They are both sitting at the old table wrapping tomorrow’s shoots in wet rags. His father’s face, thin and sharp, holds perfectly round eyes, dark with anger. His mother and woman Luo are seated on the
k’ang
near the blackwood table with its bronze Buddha, the former mending a pair of Jen-sheng’s pants, the latter sewing a new shirt for Tse-tan, who has recently outgrown everything. Woman Luo is quiet as usual, following his mother’s instructions and never complaining.

“Lazy, no-good boy,” spits Jen-sheng.

Tse-tung throws his father the empty sack, which lands at his feet.

“You think I’m stupid? You emptied it in the pond.”

“Planted,” says Tse-tung.

Jen-sheng snatches up the sack and looks inside. His black and fractured smile spreads as he discovers Tse-tung’s copy of
Water Margin
in the sack, proof of procrastination. He holds up the incriminating text and peers at his son. “What’s this?”

“A book,” answers Tse-tung. “Filled with words and stories. Ever hear of books?”

“You think you’re funny?” Jen-sheng opens the book and studies the text, squinting with incomprehension at several phrases and then shutting it with a thud. “You read this garbage instead of planting?”

“I did my planting. Ask Wu.”

“It’s time you throw away this shit and do something useful.” Jen-sheng tosses the book on the ground. “If you aren’t going to read the classics, at least count the remaining shoots and figure out how long it will take to get them all planted.”

“Not now,” says Tse-tung. “I’m hungry. I’ve been working all day.”

“You can have a bowl of rice. Eat quickly and get counting. Wen!”

Wen Ch’i-mei drops her mending on the floor and scurries into the kitchen. Tse-tung hangs his hat by the door and follows her, passing his taciturn bride, neither of them acknowledging the other. In the kitchen, Tse-tung moves beside his mother, who is scooping a ball of cold rice into a bowl.

“I did my planting,” he says to her. “I did it all.”

Wen Ch’i-mei hands him the bowl as she glances over her shoulder to make sure they’re alone. “Read your book at the table,” she whispers. “But don’t speak to him. It will make him crazy.” She hands her son a pair of chopsticks to punctuate the advice.

Tse-tung returns to the central room, scoops
Water Margin
off the ground, and takes it with him to the table. He’s sitting directly across from his father, but rather than looking at the man, he cracks open his book and lays his rice bowl on its edge. His stomach turns, pain gnawing his intestines. He’s far too anxious and fatigued to focus on the words, but if he eats and pretends to read, it will have the same effect.

“So that’s what you’re going to do, huh?” asks his incredulous father. “Read stupid books instead of helping me? No manly work? Makes sense for a girl like you. I guess you’d also prefer to read by yourself than to fuck your wife. Is that right, woman? Does he take his books into bed at night instead of fucking you? Hey, I have a good idea, Tse-tung. When you’ve finished that book and your tenth bowl of my rice, why don’t you take your virgin wife’s sewing and finish that for her too? I’ll bet you’re good at it. It’s the right kind of work for you.”

Tse-tung concentrates on the printed characters before him, although they’ve twisted and warped through the haze of his angry stare. What kind of man, he wonders, does nothing when attacked? He steals a glance at Miss Luo, who’s blushing and hunched over, her face buried in her sewing. She must think him an ineffectual coward, not so different from the lump of rice in his bowl.

He can’t stand it. Tse-tung stands on his chair and reaches up to the drying
chu tin
peppers that dangle from the rafters. Aware that everyone’s watching, he picks a long and thin specimen of deep purplish red, sure to be exceptionally strong, and pops the whole thing into his mouth. He chews the pepper and retakes his seat, firing glances across the table at his father to make sure he’s noticed, his tongue and cheeks inflamed, his brow popping with perspiration, but still focused on keeping his expression as bland as the rice he now uses to chase away the spice. This will show his father the difference between a coward girl like Luo and a man tough enough to eat a
chu tin
pepper in a single bite.

Jen-sheng leans back in his chair and laughs at his son. “If you think that’s hot,” he says mockingly, “just wait until it comes out the other end.”

Tse-tung leans over his book and blocks his view of his father with a hand on his brow. He pretends to read
Water Margin
as he works the pepper with his teeth. He’s sweating profusely, trying to resist spitting the burning mash out of his mouth.

“Oh yes, tough man! Eating
chu tin
like a real son of Hunan. Are you sure you don’t need any water with that, Tse-tung?”

“He doesn’t need water,” says Wen Ch’i-mei, glaring at her husband from her seat on the
k’ang
.

“Look at him sweat!” Jen-sheng says, leaning in so Tse-tung can’t ignore him. “Too hot for you, little boy?”

“What are you reading, Tse-tung?” counters his mother.

Jen-sheng grunts and rolls his shoulders. He sits back and grabs a wrapped rice shoot from the table.

“Must be a very interesting book to hold your attention like that,” continues Wen Ch’i-mei. “I think you’ll be a scholar when you grow up, don’t you, Tse-tung?” She turns to woman Luo beside her on the
k’ang
and touches her shoulder. “Hey, you’re a very lucky woman, miss. Your husband will be a clerk someday and take you to the
yamen
in Changsha. And from there, who knows? Tse-tung is very smart, as you can see. Maybe he’ll go to Peking to work in Empress Dowager’s court.”

“Shut up, Wen!” shouts Jen-sheng. He’s begun to shred the bright green leaves of the young shoot in his hand, scattering torn bits on the floor by his feet.

“When he passes the state exam, he’ll work for anyone in China.”

“I said shut up. You talk too much, Wen Ch’i-mei!” The family’s patriarch, having reduced the rice plant in his hands to a nest of mangled roots, now looks down and realizes what he’s done. He drops the remaining bits on the floor and shoots a desperate glance at unnamed woman Luo, hoping she hasn’t seen.

“You’re always reading, aren’t you, Tse-tung?” continues Wen Ch’i-mei. “I’ll bet you know Confucius better than anyone in China. I know what’s in store for you. You’ll pass the exam and work in government, I’m sure of it. You won’t stay a farmer in Shaoshan.”

Jen-sheng squirms, wrinkles his brow, and spits on the floor. He grabs another wrapped rice shoot, but then thinks better of it and tosses it back onto the table. He stands, puffs his chest, and looks at woman Luo. “Tse-tung,” he says.
“Finish these.” He indicates the pile of unwrapped rice plants. “I have better things to do,” he adds, and leaves the room.

Wen Ch’i-mei grins at Tse-tung, but he only responds by lowering his head deeper into his book. Something’s wrong. Wen Ch’i-mei realizes it immediately and her smile wanes. In the past, when they’ve collaborated on a plan to defeat Jen-sheng, they’ve shared triumphant looks after the old man has stomped out of the room. Maybe Tse-tung didn’t see his father leave, or maybe chewing that pepper has caused him more pain than she’s realized.