The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (8 page)

A total loss of self: that is the true value of the dance. It induces proper consciousness and right thinking. Humans are better creatures, Sâr knows, when they have lost their egos and desires, when they have abandoned themselves. Saloth Sâr, sitting on the iron bench in the park by the river, recalls his blissful engrossment in that performance, how he forgot which dancer was Chanlina, how it no longer mattered. He recalls how, with his knees tucked up against his chin—for he was already embarrassed by his egregious desire and brash humanity—he longed to disappear into the collective nothingness like one of those beautiful dancers before him, how he longed to annihilate himself through performance.

“So it can be done,” he says, sitting on the bench. “It can happen.”

He watches a fluffy white cloud block the sun over the river, casting the park into shadow.
Could there be
, he wonders,
somewhere in the world, a special dance to erase me, Saloth Sâr?

The clap of firecrackers precedes
her. Hired labourer Wu has been given the important task of igniting these mini-explosions, and his gap-toothed smile as he steps away from the black smoke indicates his pleasure with the assignment. A giggle whistles through his nose as the unnamed woman of the Luo family, riding inside the Maos’ frayed sedan chair, arrives in their open courtyard. It’s been a long and bumpy ride on the shoulders of four dangerously thin peasants. The perspiring men groan as they lower her sedan onto the gravel.

“She’s here,” says Jen-sheng, the Mao family patriarch. He’s a short and skinny man, dressed in a new cotton robe that stretches down to his ankles. His tiny eyes regard the arriving party through the front window. Madam Mao, the local matchmaker and a distant relation, stands outside beside the sedan, waiting for the next phase of the ritual. She spies Jen-sheng through the window and responds to his fierce squint with an unimpressed nod. Madam Mao is a dour old lady who smells of rancid congee and sweat. Nuptial families throughout Hsiangtan county gossip in the packed tea houses about the odorous matchmaker, how she devours their egg noodles and taints their otherwise fragrant ceremonies.

Jen-sheng notes the red lacquered box tucked underneath her arm. Empty. Luo has accepted the contract and gifts. The deal is done. “Come here,” he commands his eldest son.

“No,” replies the tall boy standing firm in the corner. His slender shoulders are pressed against the two whitewashed mud walls as if his body were a post holding up the roof.

Jen-sheng turns to face his child. “Tse-tung, your bride.”

Tse-tung cups one of his thin hands around the fingers of the other and looks at Jen-sheng, scowling. He too is dressed in a long cotton robe that stretches down to the floor. His back is rigid and his body still, which accentuates his height.

“Now!”

“She’s not my bride,” Tse-tung says calmly.

Jen-sheng’s small eyes widen for a moment. He knows what’s coming. He’s seen this behaviour from Tse-tung on previous occasions and has secretly feared for weeks that he’d see it again today, when the boy is to be married against his will. Still, he catches himself before he shows too much anxiety. Jen-sheng’s brow falls and his eyes darken. His tight-lipped frown is exaggerated by the descending tails of his moustache, two misty waterfalls plunging off either cheek. “I am your father,” he says. “Come and do your duty.”

The boy lowers his chubby cheeks and stares at a small pebble on the ground, hiding his blatant defiance. “No,” he repeats. There’s no wavering in his voice.

Jen-sheng’s shoulders sink and lock, as if he were a large-enough man to pop his chest out and intimidate his opponent. “Come here now, you unfilial beast.”

The boy, still staring at the floor, grunts in revulsion. “Who are you to say unfilial?”

Jen-sheng squints at the gross impertinence of this child, this
insect
, and he bares his few remaining black teeth. He cannot accept rebellion on such a solemn day. The boy should be bowing to his father, as would be proper for a respectful eldest son. Instead, Tse-tung remains locked in the darkest of the room’s corners, ready to fight. It will take more than a few harsh commands or even a sound beating with the switch to pry him from that position. Jen-sheng doesn’t know what to do.

“You let Grandfather rot in his chair without ever once
k’ou-t’ouing
, or asking his opinion, or serving him tea or deferring,” says Tse-tung. “A thousand times you mocked him with Li by the pond, calling him lazy and worthless. I heard you. You cannot deny it. And stupid for pawning his land. Tse-min heard you too. And yet you call me unfilial?”

“I always do my duty,” hisses his father.

Tse-tung forces an artificial chuckle. “That’s another one of your futile farts.”

Jen-sheng lunges a step, but balks. He blinks and sucks his cheeks around his decaying teeth. Jen-sheng wants to hit Tse-tung, but there are too many people around and it is too formal an occasion. All he can do is stomp his foot on the earthen floor, which has been brushed as smooth as tiles. The gesture’s nothing more than a pitiful tantrum, as the hard-packed ground absorbs any sound his foot makes and resists the imprint of his heel. In his
embarrassment, the old man glances around to see if anyone other than Tse-tung is openly mocking him. He finds only the dead stare of his rotund wife, Wen Ch’i-mei, kneeling on the ground beside the ancestral tablets, and the wide-eyed shock of his second son, twelve-year-old Tse-min, sitting near the table with his chair against the wall as if he’s hoping to disappear in the shadows.

Wen Ch’i-mei pushes herself off the floor, her hand on the wooden table to relieve the pressure from her ruined left knee, her pear-shaped face lowered and expressionless. She shuffles into the kitchen with a slight limp. Tse-tung watches her go.

“Are you sick?” Jen-sheng asks his eldest son.

Tse-tung smirks, but tries to hide it with the heel of his hand. Rivulets of sweat drip from his temples along the ridge of his jaw, falling onto the rough spun cotton of his robe. The base of his small silk hat is stained dark with sweat as well.

“I don’t think so,” continues Jen-sheng. “No, you’re perfectly well. So why don’t you remember your duties? Remember the Master’s saying:
Give your father and mother no cause for anxiety other than illness
. Your bride’s locked in the sedan. Waiting is not the rite.”

Tse-tung doesn’t say anything. An iridescent dragonfly, which has found its way into the dark room, now circles wildly in the stifling space between father and son in its confused search for an exit. Tse-tung follows the insect’s trajectory with a squint, his grin unyielding. There’s something maddening to Jen-sheng about how his son watches this dragonfly in the
midst of their confrontation, his ability to be distracted by something so ordinary, and smirking all the while.

“I said waiting is not the rite.”

“It’s true,” Tse-tung retorts. “But then the Master also said:
If one is guided by profit in one’s actions, one will incur much ill will
.”

“Your wedding’s decreed by heaven,” insists Jen-sheng. “The contract accepted. Eight characters matched.”

“You don’t believe in that old superstition.”

“It’s heaven’s will,” repeats Jen-sheng. “The old man in the moon has knotted the threads.”

Tse-tung tilts his head and laughs, high-pitched and girlish. “Oh yes!” he cries. “The old man’s threads! This, from you: a father who hasn’t made an offering to his ancestors once in his life. Now it’s ‘the old man’s threads’ and ‘a marriage decreed by heaven,’ like some peasant girl. That’s really too much. You’re full of gall.”

The dragonfly buzzes near Tse-tung and he swats it down with a flip of his wrist. The insect hits the earth and lies stunned for a moment before testing its wings and rising into the air again.

“A marriage for your son precisely when it’s too much for you to manage all the new land by yourself,” he continues. “How thoughtful of heaven. How fortunate the eight characters have matched so seamlessly at such a good time for your profit. With the laundry and the sewing, and the pigs bursting from their sty, and the rice milling more labour than Wu can handle by himself. Are you sure heaven hasn’t
decreed a wife who can also work the abacus? That would’ve been thoughtful too. You miser. You can’t bear to part with even one extra tael to pay for more help. And you quote the Master at me? Believe me, I know what Confucius says.
The gentleman understands what’s moral. The small man understands what is profitable
.”

The farmhouse’s mud-brick walls, sturdy by village standards, are nowhere near thick enough to mute this family dispute. Outside, in the courtyard, with the heat still oppressive although the sun’s nearly down, neither the malodorous matchmaker nor the thirsty peasants nor the grinning labourer Wu show any signs of overhearing this eldest son’s scandalous rebellion, but no doubt they’re already dreaming of returning to their homes and local tea houses, where they will gossip in earnest about Jen-sheng’s unfilial boy in Shaoshan. Woman Luo, the only hidden one, sitting in her locked and oven-like sedan, is especially attuned to every word of the fight, since the moods of this father and son control her fate. Each harsh phrase stabs her like a knife. His mocking grunts, his taunting laughs, the blunt refusals of a future husband are jabs to her inner organs.

Inside the house, Tse-tan, a plump two-year-old naked but for a pair of thin cloth shorts, marches into the central room and baldly stares at his brother in the corner, his face full of open curiosity.

“I think the little one’s also ready for a wife,” says Tse-tung, gesturing at the boy. “Are you sure heaven hasn’t decreed that as well?”

“Wen!” shouts Jen-sheng.

The boys’ mother scampers into the central room and awaits further instruction.

“Get him out of here.”

She scoops the child over her shoulder and takes him back into the kitchen. Tse-tan regards his furious father as he departs.

“Your problem,” says Tse-tung, “is that you’ve only eyes for money. Is eighty-four
tan
of rice not enough for you? Still hungry for more? You want to be really fat? You think I can’t see your intentions? You tell Luo you’re pious, that this will be a pious home for his daughter, but your sons know better. Don’t we, Tse-min?”

Tse-tung turns to his brother for reinforcement. Tse-min, who has remained hunched and motionless in his chair by the wall, now sits up in shock. The younger boy is thin-faced and scrawny, tense and insecure, almost a clone of his father in both appearance and attitude, except for his timidity in place of Jen-sheng’s brashness. He doesn’t know how to answer his brother; Tse-tung almost never speaks to him, let alone asks for his support. He stutters some inaudible phrase, shifts in his chair, and darts his eyes back and forth between his brother and his father. While Tse-min has enjoyed the candidness of this battle, he has also been dreading the possibility of being used by one faction or the other, of being forced to take a side, since he’s sure he’ll be destroyed for his participation by either his father’s blunt diminutions or his brother’s sly logic.

Tse-tung rolls his eyes, refusing to wait for an answer from his cowardly brother, a lackey to his father. “You can’t order
me around,” he tells Jen-sheng. “I’ll throw myself into the pond before I’ll ever follow you.”

Jen-sheng winces at the painful reminder of last year’s fight. It was a humiliating afternoon when Li and Yang and the three elder Wens from his wife’s village over Tiger Resting Path came to his house for tea. Tse-tung ambled home midway through the visit with
Three Kingdoms
tucked under his arm, his girlish hands clean and unblemished, not a second worked in the fields that morning—a shameful display before their guests. Of course, the boy received a public berating from his embarrassed father. But then, to Jen-sheng’s horror, Tse-tung did not respond with the submissive
k’ou-t’ou
appropriate to his filial role. Rather, he threw his book in the dirt, cursed his family blasphemously, and stormed out of the house, threatening to throw himself into the lotus pond. Jen-sheng and Wen Ch’i-mei followed their son to the shore, with Jen-sheng demanding a
k’ou-t’ou
in apology. Tse-tung adamantly refused out of nothing but spite. Jen-sheng had no choice but to back down and change the subject in front of all his horrified friends.

Now Jen-sheng recalls the sharp taste in his mouth as he stood by that lotus pond. That same metallic tang is currently spreading across his tongue. His throat constricts and he thirsts for public affirmation, some definite confirmation of the indisputable fact that he, Jen-sheng, is the Confucian father, the elder, the leader of the Mao clan. He knows his thirst will only be quenched by the transformation of his stone-like son into liquid. Tse-tung must melt. It’s not even a question of what Jen-sheng wants; his role in the
family demands it. Tse-tung must kneel before his father with his head touching the ground, absorbing into it like water. After so much defiance, the boy must show complete submission—spineless and limp. But Jen-sheng knows his present command will be as futile as last year’s. Still, he can’t help trying; he deserves an act of obeisance. The demands of his status are imprisoning and compelling.