YIYUN LI

The Vagrants

DEDICATION

For my parents

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PART I

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

PART II

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

PART III

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Part I

ONE

The day started before sunrise, on March 21, 1979, when Teacher Gu woke up and found his wife sobbing quietly into her blanket. A day of equality it was, or so it had occurred to Teacher Gu many times when he had pondered the date, the spring equinox, and again the thought came to him: Their daughter’s life would end on this day, when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned. A day later the sun would come closer to her and to the others on this side of the world, imperceptible perhaps to dull human eyes at first, but birds and worms and trees and rivers would sense the change in the air, and they would make it their responsibility to manifest the changing of seasons. How many miles of river melting and how many trees of blossoms blooming would it take for the season to be called spring? But such naming must mean little to the rivers and flowers, when they repeat their rhythms with faithfulness and indifference. The date set for his daughter to die was as arbitrary as her crime, determined by the court, of being an unrepentant counterrevolutionary; only the unwise would look for significance in a random date. Teacher Gu willed his body to stay still and hoped his wife would soon realize that he was awake.

She continued to cry. After a moment, he got out of bed and turned on the only light in the bedroom, an aging 10-watt bulb. A red plastic clothesline ran from one end of the bedroom to the other; the laundry his wife had hung up the night before was damp and cold, and the clothesline sagged from the weight. The fire had died in the small stove in a corner of the room. Teacher Gu thought of adding coal to the stove himself, and then decided against it. His wife, on any other day, would be the one to revive the fire. He would leave the stove for her to tend.

From the clothesline he retrieved a handkerchief, white, with printed red Chinese characters—a slogan demanding absolute loyalty to the Communist Party from every citizen—and laid it on her pillow. “Everybody dies,” he said.

Mrs. Gu pressed the handkerchief to her eyes. Soon the wet stains expanded, turning the slogan crimson.

“Think of today as the day we pay everything off,” Teacher Gu said. “The whole debt.”

“What debt? What do we owe?” his wife demanded, and he winced at the unfamiliar shrillness in her voice. “What are we owed?”

He had no intention of arguing with her, nor had he answers to her questions. He quietly dressed and moved to the front room, leaving the bedroom door ajar.

The front room, which served as kitchen and dining room, as well as their daughter Shan’s bedroom before her arrest, was half the size of the bedroom and cluttered with decades of accumulations. A few jars, once used annually to make Shan’s favorite pickles, sat empty and dusty on top of one another in a corner. Next to the jars was a cardboard box in which Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu kept their two hens, as much for companionship as for the few eggs they laid. Upon hearing Teacher Gu’s steps, the hens stirred, but he ignored them. He put on his old sheepskin coat, and before leaving the house, he tore a sheet bearing the date of the previous day off the calendar, a habit he had maintained for decades. Even in the unlit room, the date, March 21, 1979, and the small characters underneath, Spring Equinox, stood out. He tore the second sheet off too and squeezed the two thin squares of paper into a ball. He himself was breaking a ritual now, but there was no point in pretending that this was a day like any other.

Teacher Gu walked to the public outhouse at the end of the alley. On normal days his wife would trail behind him. They were a couple of habit, their morning routine unchanged for the past ten years. The alarm went off at six o’clock and they would get up at once. When they returned from the outhouse, they would take turns washing at the sink, she pumping the water out for both of them, neither speaking.

A few steps away from the house, Teacher Gu spotted a white sheet with a huge red check marked across it, pasted on the wall of the row houses, and he knew that it carried the message of his daughter’s death. Apart from the lone streetlamp at the far end of the alley and a few dim morning stars, it was dark. Teacher Gu walked closer, and saw that the characters in the announcement were written in the ancient Li-styled calligraphy, each stroke carrying extra weight, as if the writer had been used to such a task, spelling out someone’s imminent death with unhurried elegance. Teacher Gu imagined the name belonging to a stranger, whose sin was not of the mind, but a physical one. He could then, out of the habit of an intellectual, ignore the grimness of the crime—a rape, a murder, a robbery, or any misdeed against innocent souls—and appreciate the calligraphy for its aesthetic merit, but the name was none other than the one he had chosen for his daughter, Gu Shan.

Teacher Gu had long ago ceased to understand the person bearing that name. He and his wife had been timid, law-abiding citizens all their lives. Since the age of fourteen, Shan had been wild with passions he could not grasp, first a fanatic believer in Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution, and later an adamant nonbeliever and a harsh critic of her generation’s revolutionary zeal. In ancient tales she could have been one of those divine creatures who borrow their mothers’ wombs to enter the mortal world and make a name for themselves, as a heroine or a devil, depending on the intention of the heavenly powers. Teacher Gu and his wife could have been her parents for as long as she needed them to nurture her. But even in those old tales, the parents, bereft when their children left them for some destined calling, ended up heartbroken, flesh-and-blood humans as they were, unable to envision a life larger than their own.

Teacher Gu heard the creak of a gate down the alley, and he hurried to leave before he was caught weeping in front of the announcement. His daughter was a counterrevolutionary, and it was a perilous situation for anyone, her parents included, to be seen shedding tears over her looming death.

When Teacher Gu returned home, he found his wife rummaging in an old trunk. A few young girls’ outfits, the ones that she had been unwilling to sell to secondhand stores when Shan had outgrown them, were laid out on the unmade bed. Soon more were added to the pile, blouses and trousers, a few pairs of nylon socks, some belonging to Shan before her arrest but most of them her mother’s. “We haven’t bought her any new clothes for ten years,” his wife explained to him in a calm voice, folding a woolen Mao jacket and a pair of matching trousers that Mrs. Gu wore only for holidays and special occasions. “We’ll have to make do with mine.”

It was the custom of the region that when a child died, the parents burned her clothes and shoes to keep the child warm and comfortable on the trip to the next world. Teacher Gu had felt for the parents he’d seen burning bags at crossroads, calling out the names of their children, but he could not imagine his wife, or himself, doing this. At twenty-eight—twenty-eight, three months, and eleven days old, which she would always be from now on—Shan was no longer a child. Neither of them could go to a crossroad and call out to her counterrevolutionary ghost.

“I should have remembered to buy a new pair of dress shoes for her,” his wife said. She placed an old pair of Shan’s leather shoes next to her own sandals on top of the pile. “She loves leather shoes.”

Teacher Gu watched his wife pack the outfits and shoes into a cloth bag. He had always thought that the worst form of grieving was to treat the afterlife as a continuity of living—that people would carry on the burden of living not only for themselves but also for the dead. Be aware not to fall into the futile and childish tradition of uneducated villagers, he thought of reminding his wife, but when he opened his mouth, he could not find words gentle enough for his message. He left her abruptly for the front room.

The small cooking stove was still unlit. The two hens in the cardboard box clucked with hungry expectation. On a normal day his wife would start the fire and cook the leftover rice into porridge while he fed the hens a small handful of millet. Teacher Gu refilled the food tin. The hens looked as attentive in their eating as did his wife in her packing. He pushed a dustpan underneath the stove and noisily opened the ash grate. Yesterday’s ashes fell into the dustpan without a sound.

“Shall we send the clothes to her now?” his wife asked. She was standing by the door, a plump bag in her arms. “I’ll start the fire when we come back,” she said when he did not reply.

“We can’t go out and burn that bag,” Teacher Gu whispered.

His wife stared at him with a questioning look.

“It’s not the right thing to do,” he said. It frustrated him that he had to explain these things to her. “It’s superstitious, reactionary—it’s all wrong.”

“What is the right thing to do? To applaud the murderers of our daughter?” The unfamiliar shrillness had returned to her voice, and her face took on a harsh expression.

“Everybody dies,” he said.

“Shan is being murdered. She is innocent.”

“It’s not up to us to decide such things,” he said. For a second he almost blurted out that their daughter was not as innocent as his wife thought. It was not a surprise that a mother was the first one to forgive and forget her own child’s wrongdoing.

“I’m not talking about what we could decide,” she said, raising her voice. “I’m asking for your conscience. Do you really believe she should die because of what she has written?”

Conscience is not part of what one needs to live, Teacher Gu thought, but before he could say anything, someone knocked on the thin wall that separated their house from their neighbors’, a protest at the noise they were making at such an early hour perhaps, or, more probably, a warning. Their next-door neighbors were a young couple who had moved in a year earlier; the wife, a branch leader of the district Communist Youth League, had come to the Gus’ house twice and questioned them about their attitudes toward their imprisoned daughter. “The party and the people have put trusting hands on your shoulders, and it’s up to you to help her correct her mistake,” the woman had said both times, observing their reactions with sharp, birdlike eyes. That was before Shan’s retrial; they had hoped then that she would soon be released, after she had served the ten years from the first trial. They had not expected that she would be retried for what she had written in her journals in prison, or that words she had put on paper would be enough evidence to warrant a death sentence.

Teacher Gu turned off the light, but the knocking continued. In the darkness he could see the light in his wife’s eyes, more fearful than angry. They were no more than birds that panicked at the first twang of a bow. In a gentle voice Teacher Gu urged, “Let me have the bag.”

She hesitated and then passed the bag to him; he hid it behind the hens’ box, the small noise of their scratching and pecking growing loud in the empty space. From the dark alley occasional creaks of opening gates could be heard, and a few crows stirred on the roof of a nearby house, their croaking carrying a strange conversational tone. Teacher Gu and his wife waited, and when there were no more knocks on the wall, he told her to take a rest before daybreak.

THE CITY OF MUDDY RIVER was named after the river that ran eastward on the southern border of the town. Downstream, the Muddy River joined other rivers to form the Golden River, the biggest river in the northeastern plain, though the Golden River did not carry gold but was rubbish-filled and heavily polluted by industrial cities on both banks. Equally misnamed, the Muddy River came from the melting snow on White Mountain. In summers, boys swimming in the river could look up from underwater at the wavering sunshine through the transparent bodies of busy minnows, while their sisters, pounding laundry on the boulders along the bank, sometimes sang revolutionary songs in chorus, their voices as clear and playful as the water.

Built on a slice of land between a mountain in the north and the river in the south, the city assumed the shape of a spindle. Expansion was limited by both the mountain and the river, but from its center the town spread to the east and the west until it tapered off to undeveloped wilderness. It took thirty minutes to walk from North Mountain to the riverbank on the south, and two hours to cover the distance between the two tips of the spindle. Yet for a town of its size, Muddy River was heavily populated and largely self-sufficient. The twenty-year-old city, a development planned to industrialize the rural area, relied on its many small factories to provide jobs and commodities for the residents. The housing was equally planned out, and apart from a few buildings of four or five stories around the city square, and a main street with a department store, a cinema, two marketplaces, and many small shops, the rest of the town was partitioned into twenty big blocks that in turn were divided into nine smaller blocks, each of which consisted of four rows of eight connected, one-storied houses. Every house, a square of fifteen feet on its sides, consisted of a bedroom and a front room, with a small front yard circled by a wooden fence or, for better-off families, a brick wall taller than a man’s height. The front alleys between the yards were a few feet wide; the back alleys allowed only one person to squeeze through. To avoid having people gaze directly into other people’s beds, the only window in the bedroom was a small square high up on the back wall. In warmer months it was not uncommon for a child to call out to his mother, and for another mother, in a different house, to answer; even in the coldest season, people heard their neighbors’ coughing, and sometimes snoring, through the closed windows.

It was in these numbered blocks that eighty thousand people lived, parents sharing, with their children, brick beds that had wood-stoves built underneath them for heating. Sometimes a grandparent slept there too. It was rare to see both grandparents in a house, as the city was a new one and its residents, recent immigrants from villages near and far, would take in their parents only when they were widowed and no longer able to live on their own.

Except for these lonely old people, the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979 were auspicious for Muddy River as well as for the nation. Two years earlier, Chairman Mao had passed away and within a month, Madame Mao and her gang in the central government had been arrested, and together they had been blamed for the ten years of Cultural Revolution that had derailed the country. News of national policies to develop technology and the economy was delivered by rooftop loudspeakers in cities and the countryside alike, and if a man was to travel from one town to the next, he would find himself, like the blind beggar mapping this part of the province near Muddy River with his old fiddle and his aged legs, awakened at sunrise and then lulled to sleep at sundown by the same news read by different announcers; spring after ten long years of winter, these beautiful voices sang in chorus, forecasting a new Communist era full of love and progress.

In a block on the western side where the residential area gradually gave way to the industrial region, people slept in row houses similar to the Gus’, oblivious, in their last dreams before daybreak, of the parents who were going to lose their daughter on this day. It was in one of these houses that Tong woke up, laughing. The moment he opened his eyes he could no longer remember the dream, but the laughter was still there, like the aftertaste of his favorite dish, meat stewed with potatoes. Next to him on the brick bed, his parents were asleep, his mother’s hair swirled around his father’s finger. Tong tiptoed over his parents’ feet and reached for his clothes, which his mother always kept warm above the woodstove. To Tong, a newcomer in his own parents’ house, the brick bed remained a novelty, with mysterious and complex tunnels and a stove built underneath.

Tong had grown up in his maternal grandparents’ village, in Hebei Province, and had moved back to his parents’ home only six months earlier, when it was time for him to enter elementary school. Tong was not the only child, but the only one living under his parents’ roof now. His two elder brothers had left home for the provincial capitals after middle school, just as their parents had left their home villages twenty years earlier for Muddy River; both boys worked as apprentices in factories, and their futures—marriages to suitable female workers in the provincial capital, children born with legal residency in that city filled with grand Soviet-style buildings—were mapped out by Tong’s parents in their conversations. Tong’s sister, homely even by their parents’ account, had managed to marry herself into a bigger town fifty miles down the river.

Tong did not know his siblings well, nor did he know that he owed his existence to a torn condom. His father, whose patience had been worn thin by working long hours at the lathe and feeding three teenage children, had not rejoiced when the new baby arrived, a son whom many other households would have celebrated. He had insisted on sending Tong to his wife’s parents, and after a day of crying, Tong’s mother started a heroic twenty-eight-hour trip with a one-month-old baby on board an overcrowded train. Tong did not remember the grunting pigs and the smoking peasants riding side by side with him, but his piercing cries had hardened his mother’s heart. By the time she arrived at her home village, she felt nothing but relief at handing him over to her parents. Tong had seen his parents only twice in the first six years of his life, yet he had not felt deprived until the moment they plucked him out of the village and brought him to an unfamiliar home.

Tong went quietly to the front room now. Without turning on the light, he found his toothbrush with a tiny squeeze of toothpaste on it, and a basin filled with water by the washstand—Tong’s mother never forgot to prepare for his morning wash the night before, and it was these small things that made Tong understand her love, even though she was more like a kind stranger to him. He rinsed his mouth with a quick gurgle and smeared the toothpaste on the outside of the cup to reassure his mother; with one finger, he dabbed some water on his forehead and on both cheeks, the amount of washing he would allow himself.

Tong was not used to the way his parents lived. At his grandparents’ village, the peasants did not waste their money on strange-tasting toothpaste or fragrant soap. “What’s the point of washing one’s face and looking pretty?” his grandfather had often said when he told tales of ancient legends. “Live for thirty years in the wind and the dust and the rain and the snow without washing your face and you will grow up into a real man.” Tong’s parents laughed at such talk. It seemed an urgent matter for Tong’s mother that he take up the look and manner of a town boy, but despite her effort to bathe him often and dress him in the best clothes they could afford, even the youngest children in the neighborhood could tell from Tong’s village accent that he did not belong. Tong held no grudge against his parents, and he did not tell them about the incidents when he was made a clown at school. Turnip Head, the boys called him, and sometimes Garlic Mouth, or Village Bun.

Tong put on his coat, a hand-me-down from his sister. His mother had taken the trouble to redo all the buckles, but the coat still looked more like a girl’s than a boy’s. When he opened the door to the small yard, Ear, Tong’s dog, sprang from his cardboard box and dashed toward him. Ear was two, and he had accompanied Tong all the way from the village to Muddy River, but to Tong’s parents, he was nothing but a mutt, and his yellow shining pelt and dark almond-shaped eyes held little charm for them.

The dog placed his two front paws on Tong’s shoulders and made a soft gurgling sound. Tong put a finger on his lips and hushed Ear. His parents did not awake, and Tong was relieved. In his previous life in the village, Ear had not been trained to stay quiet and unobtrusive. Had it not been for Tong’s parents and the neighbors’ threats to sell Ear to a restaurant, Tong would never have had the heart to slap the dog when they first arrived. A city was an unforgiving place, or so it seemed to Tong, as even the smallest mistake could become a grave offense.

Together they ran toward the gate, the dog leaping ahead. In the street, the last hour of night lingered around the dim yellow street-lamps and the unlit windows of people’s bedrooms. Around the corner Tong saw Old Hua, the rubbish collector, bending over and rummaging in a pile with a huge pair of pliers, picking out the tiniest fragments of used paper and sticking them into a burlap sack. Every morning, Old Hua went through the city’s refuse before the crew of young men and women from the city’s sanitation department came and carted it away.

“Good morning, Grandpa Hua,” Tong said.

“Good morning,” replied Old Hua. He stood up and wiped his eyes; they were bald of eyelashes, red and teary. Tong had learned not to stare at Old Hua’s afflicted eyes. They had looked frightening at first, but when Tong had got to know the old man better, he forgot about them. Old Hua treated Tong as if he was an important person—the old man stopped working with his pliers when he talked to Tong, as if he was afraid to miss the most interesting things the boy would say. For that reason Tong always averted his eyes in respect when he talked to the old man. The town boys, however, ran after Old Hua and called him Red-eyed Camel, and it saddened Tong that the old man never seemed to mind.

Old Hua took a small stack of paper from his pocket—some ripped-off pages from newspapers and some papers with only one side used, all pressed as flat as possible—and passed them to Tong. Every morning, Old Hua kept the clean paper for Tong, who could read and then practice writing in the unused space. Tong thanked Old Hua and put the paper into his coat pocket. He looked around and did not see Old Hua’s wife, who would have been waving the big bamboo broom by now, coughing in the dust. Mrs. Hua was a street sweeper, employed by the city government.

“Where is Grandma Hua? Is she sick today?”

“She’s putting up some announcements first thing in the morning. Notice of an execution.”

“Our school is going to see it today,” Tong said. “A gun to the bad man’s head. Bang.”

Old Hua shook his head and did not reply. It was different at school, where the boys spoke of the field trip as a thrilling event, and none of the teachers opposed their excitement. “Do you know the bad man in the announcement?” Tong asked Old Hua.

“Go and look,” Old Hua said and pointed down the street. “Come back and tell me what you think.”

At the end of the street Tong saw a newly pasted announcement, the two bottom corners already coming loose in the wind. He found a rickety chair in front of a yard and dragged it over and climbed up, but still he was not tall enough, even on tiptoes, to reach the bottom of the paper. He gave up and let the corners flap on their own.

The light from the streetlamps was weak, but the eastern sky had taken on a hue of bluish white like that of an upturned fish belly. Tong read the announcement aloud, skipping the words he did not know how to pronounce but guessing their meanings without much trouble:

Counterrevolutionary Gu Shan, female, twenty-eight, was sentenced to death, with all political rights deprived. The execution will be carried out on the twenty-first of March, nineteen seventy-nine. For educational purposes, all schools and work units are required to attend the pre-execution denunciation ceremony.

At the bottom of the announcement was a signature, two out of three of whose characters Tong did not recognize. A huge check in red ink covered the entire announcement.

“You understand the announcement all right?” asked the old man, when Tong found him at another bin.

“Yes.”

“Does it say it’s a woman?”

“Yes.”

“She is very young, isn’t she?”

Twenty-eight was not an age that Tong could imagine as young. At school he had been taught stories about young heroes. A shepherd boy, seven and a half years old, not much older than Tong, led the Japanese invaders to the minefield when they asked him for directions, and he died along with the enemies. Another boy, at thirteen, protected the property of the people’s commune from robbery and was murdered by the thief. Liu Hulan, at fifteen and a half, was executed by the White Army as the youngest Communist Party member of her province, and before she was beheaded, she was reported to have sneered at the executioners and said, “She who works for Communism does not fear death.” The oldest heroine he knew of was a Soviet girl named Zoya; at nineteen she was hanged by the German Fascists, but nineteen was long enough for the life of a heroine.

“Twenty-eight is too early for a woman to die,” Old Hua said.

“Liu Hulan sacrificed her life for the Communist cause at fifteen,” replied Tong.

“Young children should think about living, not about sacrificing,” Old Hua said. “It’s up to us old people to ponder death.”

Tong found that he didn’t agree with the old man, but he did not want to say so. He smiled uncertainly, and was glad to see Ear trot back, eager to go on their morning exploration.

EVEN THE TINIEST NOISE could wake up a hungry and cold soul: the faint bark of a dog, a low cough from a neighbor’s bedroom, footsteps in the alley that transformed into thunder in Nini’s dreams while leaving others undisturbed, her father’s snore. With her good hand, Nini wrapped the thin quilt around herself, but hard as she tried, there was always part of her body exposed to the freezing air. With the limited supply of coal the family had, the fire went out every night in the stove under the brick bed, and sleeping farthest from the stove, Nini had felt the coldness seeping into her body through the thin cotton mattress and the layers of old clothes she did not take off at bedtime. Her parents slept at the other end, where the stove, directly underneath them, would keep them warm for the longest time. In the middle were her four younger sisters, aged ten, eight, five, and three, huddled in two pairs to keep each other warm. The only other person awake was the baby, who, like Nini, had no one to cuddle with for the night and who now was fumbling for their mother’s breast.

Nini got out of bed and slipped into an oversize cotton coat, in which she could easily hide her deformed hand. The baby followed Nini’s movement with bright, expressionless eyes, and then, frustrated by her futile effort, bit with her newly formed teeth. Their mother screamed, and slapped the baby without opening her eyes. “You debt collector. Eat. Eat. Eat. All you know is eating. Were you starved to death in your last life?”

The baby howled. Nini frowned. For hungry people like the baby and Nini herself, morning always came too early. Sometimes she huddled with the baby when they were both awake, and the baby would mistake her for their mother and bump her heavy head into Nini’s chest; those moments made Nini feel special, and for this reason she felt close to the baby and responsible for all that the baby could not get from their mother.

Nini limped over to the baby. She picked her up and hushed her, sticking a finger into the baby’s mouth and feeling her new, beadlike teeth. Except for Nini’s first and second sisters, who went to elementary school now, the rest of the girls, like Nini herself, did not have official names. Her parents had not even bothered to give the younger girls nicknames, as they did to Nini; they were simply called “Little Fourth,” “Little Fifth,” and, the baby, “Little Sixth.”

The baby sucked Nini’s finger hard, but after a while, unsatisfied, she let go of the finger and started to cry. Their mother opened her eyes. “Can’t you both be dead for a moment?”

Nini shuffled Little Sixth back to bed and fled before her father woke up. In the front room Nini grabbed the bamboo basket for collecting coal and stumbled on a pair of boots. A few steps into the alley, she could still hear the baby’s crying. Someone banged on the window and protested. Nini tried to quicken her steps, her crippled left leg making bigger circles than usual, and the basket, hung by the rope to her shoulder, slapped on her hip with a disturbed rhythm.

At the end of the alley Nini saw an announcement on the wall. She walked closer and looked at the huge red check. She did not recognize a single character on the announcement—her parents had long ago made it clear that for an invalid like her, education was a waste of money—but she knew by the smell that the paste used to glue the announcement to the wall was made of flour. Her stomach grumbled. She looked around for a step stool or some bricks; finding none, she set the basket on the ground with its bottom up and stepped onto it. The bottom sagged but did not give way under her weight. She reached a corner of the announcement with her good hand and peeled it off the wall. The flour paste had not dried or frozen yet, and Nini scraped the paste off the announcement and stuffed all five fingers into her mouth. The paste was cold but sweet. She scraped more of it off the announcement. She was sucking her fingers when a feral cat pounced off a wall and stopped a few feet away, examining her with silent menace. She hurried down from the basket, almost falling onto her bad foot, and sending the cat scurrying away.

At the next street corner Nini caught up with Mrs. Hua, who was brushing paste on the four corners of an announcement when the girl walked up.

“Good morning,” the old woman said.

Nini looked at the small basin of paste without replying. Sometimes she greeted Mrs. Hua nicely, but when she was in a bad mood, which happened often, she sucked the inside of her mouth hard so that no one could make her talk. Today was one of those days—Little Sixth had caused trouble again. Of all the people in the world, Nini loved Little Sixth best, yet this love, a heavy knot in her stomach, as Nini sometimes felt it, could not alleviate her hunger.

“Did you have a good sleep?”

Nini did not reply. How did Mrs. Hua expect her to sleep well when she was always starving? The few mouthfuls of paste had already vanished, and the slight sweet taste in her mouth made her hungrier.

The old woman took a leftover bun from her pocket, something she made sure to bring along every morning in case she saw Nini, though the girl would never know this. Nini reminded Mrs. Hua of the daughters she had once had, all of those girls discarded by their parents. In another life she would have adopted Nini and kept her warm and well fed, Mrs. Hua thought. It seemed that not too long ago life had been a solid dam for her and her husband—with each baby girl they had picked up in their vagrancy, they had discovered once and again that, even for beggars, life was not tightfisted with moments of exhilaration—but the dam had been cracked and taken over by flood, their happiness wiped out like hopeless lowland. Mrs. Hua watched Nini take a big bite of the bun, then another. A few bites later, the girl started to hiccup.

“You are eating too fast,” Mrs. Hua said. “Remember to chew.”

When half of the bun was gone, Nini slowed down. Mrs. Hua went back to the announcement. Years of sweeping the street and, before that, wandering from town to town and rummaging through the refuse had given the old woman’s back a permanent stoop, but still she was unusually tall, towering over most men and other women. Perhaps that was why the old woman got the job, Nini thought, to put the announcements out of people’s reach so nobody could steal the paste.

Mrs. Hua patted the corners of the announcement onto the wall. “I’m off to the next street,” she said.

Nini did not move, looking sharply at the basin of paste in Mrs. Hua’s hand. The old woman followed Nini’s eyes and shook her head. Seeing nobody in the street, she took a sheet from the pile of announcements and folded it into a cone. “Take it,” she said and placed the cone in Nini’s good hand.

Nini watched Mrs. Hua scoop some paste into the paper cone. When there was no sign of any more, Nini licked her hand clean of the dribbles. Mrs. Hua watched her with unspeakable sadness. She was about to say something, but Nini began to walk away. “Nini, throw the paper cup away after you finish it,” the old woman said in a low voice behind her. “Don’t let people see you are using the announcement.”

Nini nodded without looking back. Between hiccups she was still biting the inside of her mouth hard, making sure she did not say a word more than necessary. She did not understand Mrs. Hua’s kindness toward her. She accepted the benevolence of the world, as much as she did its cruelty, just as she was resigned to her body being born deformed. Knowledge of human beings came to Nini from eavesdropping on tales—her parents, in their best mood, walked around her as if she were a piece of furniture, and other people seemed to be able to ignore her existence. This meant Nini could learn things that other children were not allowed to hear. At the marketplace, housewives talked about “bedroom business” with loud giggles; they made mean jokes about the teenage peddlers from the mountain villages, who, new in their business, tried hard not to notice the women’s words yet often betrayed themselves by blushing. The neighbors, after a day’s work and before dinner, gathered in twos and threes in the alley and exchanged gossip, Nini’s existence nearby never making them change topics hurriedly, as another child walking past would do. She heard stories of all kinds—a daughter-in-law mixing shredded grass into the dumpling filling for her mother-in-law, a nanny slapping and permanently deafening a baby, a couple making too much noise when they made “bedroom business,” so that the neighbor, a mechanic working at the quarry, installed a mini – time bomb to shock the husband’s penis into cotton candy—such tales bought Nini pleasures that other children obtained from toys or games with companions, and even though she knew enough to maintain a nonchalant expression, the momentary freedom and glee offered by eavesdropping were her closest experiences of a childhood that was unavailable to her, a loss of which she was not aware.

The six-thirty freight train whistled. Every morning, Nini went to collect coal at the train station. The Cross-river Bridge, the only one connecting the town to the other bank of the Muddy River, had four lanes, but at this early hour, trucks and bicycles were scarce. The only other pedestrians were women and teenage peasants coming down the mountains, with newly laid eggs kept warm in their handkerchiefs, small tins of fresh milk from goats and cows, and homemade noodles and pancakes. Walking against the flow of the peasants, Nini eyed them with suspicion as they looked back at her, not bothering to hide their revulsion at the sight of her deformed face.

The railway station near the Cross-river Bridge was a stop for freight only. Coal, timber, and aluminum ore from the mountains were loaded here and carried on to big cities. The passenger trains stopped at a different station on the west end of the town, and sometimes, standing on the bridge, Nini saw them rumble past, people’s faces visible in the many squares of windows. Nini always wondered what it felt like to go from one place to another in the blink of an eye. She loved speed—the long trains whose clinking wheels sparked on the rail; the jeeps with government plate numbers, racing even in the most crowded streets, stirring up dust in the dry season, splattering mud when it was raining; the ice drifts flowing down the Muddy River in the spring; the daredevil teenage boys on their bicycles, pedaling hard while keeping both hands off the handlebars.

Nini quickened her steps. If she did not get to the railway station fast enough, the workers would have transferred the coal from trucks to the freight cars. Every morning, the workers, out of intentional carelessness, would drop some coal to the ground, and later would divide it among themselves. Nini’s morning chore was to stand nearby, staring and waiting until one of the workers finally acknowledged her presence and gave her a small share of the coal. Everyone worked for her food, Nini’s mother had said many times, and all Nini wanted was to reach the station in time, so she would not be denied her breakfast.

WALKING ACROSS THE BRIDGE in the opposite direction from Nini, among the clusters of peasants, Bashi was deep in thought and did not see the girl, nor did he hear two peasant women commenting on Nini’s misshapen face. He was preoccupied in his imagination with what a girl was like down there between her legs. Bashi was nineteen, had never seen a girl’s private parts, and was unable to picture what they would be like. This, for Bashi, son of a Communist hero—the reddest of the red seeds—was an upsetting deficiency.

Bashi’s father had served in the Korean War as one of the first pilots of the nation, and had been awarded many titles as a war hero. The American bombs had not killed him but a small human error had—he died from a tonsillectomy the year Bashi was two. The doctor who injected the wrong anesthesia was later sentenced to death for subverting the Communist nation and murdering one of its best pilots, but what happened to the doctor, whether it had been a life or a death sentence, meant little to Bashi. His mother had left him to his paternal grandmother and remarried herself into another province, and ever since then his life had been subsidized by the government. The compensation, a generous sum compared to other people’s earnings, made it possible for his grandmother and him to live in modest comfort. She had hoped he would be a good student and earn a decent living by his wits, but that did not happen, as Bashi had little use for his education. She worried and nagged at him, but he forgave her because she was the only person who loved him and whom he loved back. Someday she would die—her health had been deteriorating over the past two years, and her brain was muddled now with facts and fantasies that she could not tell apart. Bashi did not look forward to the day she would leave him for the other side of the world, but in the meantime, he was aware that the house, although owned by the government, would be his to occupy as long as he lived, and the money in their savings account would be enough to pay for his meals and clothes and coal without his having to lift a finger. What else could he ask of life? A wife for sure, but how much more food could she consume? As far as Bashi was concerned, he could have a comfortable life with a woman, and neither of them would have to make the slightest effort to work.

The problem, then, was how to find a woman. Apart from his grandmother, Bashi had little luck with other women. Older ones, those his grandmother’s or his mother’s age, used him as a warning for their offspring. They would be too ashamed to meet their ancestors after their deaths if it turned out that they would have to endure a son, or a grandson, like Bashi—these comments, often loud enough for Bashi to hear, were directed at those children who needed a cautionary tale. Younger women of a suitable age for marriage avoided Bashi as a swan princess in the folktales would avoid a toad. It was Bashi’s belief that he needed to gain more knowledge of a woman’s body before he could gain access to her heart, but who among the young women looking at him despisingly would open up her secrets to him?

Bashi’s hope now lay with much younger girls. He had already made several attempts, offering little girls from different neighborhoods candies, but none of them had agreed to go with him into the high grasses by the riverbank. Even worse, one of the girls told her parents, and they gave him a good beating and spread the news around so that wherever he went now, he felt that people with daughters were keeping a watchful eye on him. The little girls made up a song about him, calling him a wolf and skunk and girl-chasing eel. He was not offended; rather, he liked to walk into the girls’ circle in the middle of their games, and he would smile when they chanted the song to his face. He imagined taking them one by one to a secret bush and studying what he needed to study with them, and he smiled more delightedly since none of the girls would ever have guessed what could have been happening to them at that very moment, these young girls singing for him in their fine, lovely voices.

Bashi had other plans too. For instance, hiding in the public outhouse after midnight, or in the early morning, when females would arrive in a hurried, half-dreaming state, too sleepy to recognize him as he squatted in a place where the light from the single bulb did not reach. But the idea of squatting for a long stretch of time, cold, tired, and stinking, prevented Bashi from carrying out this plan. He might as well dress up in his grandma’s clothes and wrap his head in a shawl to go to a public bathhouse. He could talk in a high-pitched voice and ask for a ticket to the women’s section, go into the locker room and feast his eyes on the women undressing. He could stay for a while and then pretend he had to go home to take care of some important things, a chicken stewing on the stove maybe, or some forgotten laundry on the clothesline.

Then there were other possibilities that offered more permanent hope, like finding a baby girl on the riverbank, which was what Bashi was trying to do now. He had searched the bank along the railway track, and now he walked slowly on the town side of the river and looked behind every boulder and tree stump. It was unlikely that someone would leave a baby girl out here in this cold season, but it never hurt to check. Bashi had found a baby girl, one February morning two years earlier, underneath the Cross-river Bridge. The baby had been frozen stiff, if not by the cold night, then by death itself. He had studied its gray face; the thought of opening the blanket and looking underneath the rags, for some reason, chilled him, so he left it where it had been deserted. He went back to the spot an hour later, and a group of people had gathered. A baby girl it must be, people said, a good solid baby but what a pity it wasn’t born a boy. It takes only a few layers of wet straw paper, and no more than five minutes, people said, as if they had all suffocated a baby girl at least once in their lives, talking about the details in that vivid way. Bashi tried to suggest that the baby might have frozen to death, but nobody seemed to hear him. They talked among themselves until Old Hua and his wife came and put the small bundle of rags into a burlap sack. Bashi was the only one to accompany the Huas to where they buried deserted babies. Up the river at the western end of town it was, where white nameless flowers bloomed all summer long, known to the children in town as dead-baby flowers. On that day the ground was too frozen to dig even the smallest hole; the couple found a small alcove behind a rock, and covered the baby up with dry leaves and dead grass, and then marked the place. They would come back later to bury her, they told Bashi, and he replied that he had no doubt they would send her off properly, good-hearted people as they were, never letting down a soul.

Bashi believed that if he waited long enough, someday he would find a live baby on the riverbank. He did not understand why people did not care for baby girls. He certainly wouldn’t mind taking one home, feeding her, bathing her, and bringing her up, but such a plan he had to keep secret from his townsfolk, who treated him as an idiot. And idiocy seemed to be one of the rare crimes for which one could never get enough punishment. A robber or a thief got a sentence of a year or more for a crime, but the tag of idiot, just as counterrevolutionary, was a charge against someone’s very being, and for that reason Bashi did not like his fellow townsfolk. Even a counterrevolutionary sometimes got depurged, as he often heard these days. There were plenty of stories on the radio about so-and-so who had been wronged in the Cultural Revolution and was reabsorbed into the big Communist family, but for Bashi, such redemption seemed beyond reach. People rarely paid attention to him when he joined a conversation at an intersection or a roadside chess party on summer evenings, and when they did, they all held disbelieving and bemused smiles on their faces, as if he made them realize how much more intelligent they themselves were. Bashi had often made up his mind never to talk to these people, but the next time he saw these gatherings, he became hopeful again. Despite being badly treated, he loved people, and loved talking to them. He dreamed of the day when the townspeople would understand his importance; perhaps they would even grab his hands and shoulders and apologize for their mistake.

A dog trotted across to the riverbank, its golden fur shimmering in the morning light. In its mouth was a paper cone. Bashi whistled to the dog. “Ear, here, what treasure did you find?”

The dog looked at Bashi and stepped back. The dog belonged to a newcomer in town, and Bashi had studied both the dog and the boy. He thought Ear a strange name for a dog, and believed the boy who had named it must have something wrong with him. They were two of a kind, village-grown and not too bright. Bashi put a hand into his pocket, and said in a gentle voice, “A bone here, Ear.”

The dog hesitated and did not come to Bashi. He held the dog’s eyes with his own and inched closer, calling out again in his gentle voice, then without warning he picked up a rock and hurled it at the dog, which gave out a short yelp and ran away, dropping the paper cone on the ground. Bashi continued to hurl rocks in the direction where the dog had disappeared. Once before, he had been able to lure Ear closer so he could give it a good kick in its belly.

Bashi picked up the paper cone and spread it on the ground. The ink was smeared, but the message was clear. “A counterrevolutionary is not a game,” Bashi said aloud. The name on the announcement sounded unfamiliar, and Bashi wondered if the woman was from town. Whose daughter was she? The thought of someone’s daughter being executed was upsetting; no crime committed by a young woman should lead to such a horrible ending, but was she still a maiden? Bashi read the announcement again; little information was given about this Gu Shan. Perhaps she was married—a twenty-eight-year-old was not expected to remain a girl, except …“A spinster?” Bashi spoke aloud to finish his thought. He wondered what the woman had done to earn herself the title of counterrevolutionary. The only other person he knew who had committed a similar crime was the doctor who had killed his father. Bashi read the announcement again. Her name sounded nice, so perhaps she was just someone like him, someone whom nobody understood and no one bothered to understand. What a pity she would have to die on the day he discovered her.

TONG CALLED OUT Ear’s name several times before the dog reappeared. “Did you bother the black dog again?” Tong asked Ear, who was running toward Tong in panic. The black dog belonged to Old Kwen, a janitor for the electric plant who, unlike most people living in the blocks, occupied a small, run-down shack at the border between the residential and industrial areas. Old Kwen and his dog were among the few things Tong’s father had told him about the town when Tong had first arrived. Leashed all its life in front of the shack and allowed to move only in a radius of less than five feet, the dog was said to be the meanest and the best guard dog in town, ready to knock down and bite through the throat of anyone who dared to set foot near his master’s shack; stay away from a man who keeps a dog like this, Tong’s father had warned him, but when Tong asked why, his father did not give an explanation.

Too curious and too friendly, Ear had approached the black dog several times, and each time the black dog had growled and jumped up, pulling at the end of his chain with fierce force; it would then take Tong a long time to calm Ear down. “You have to learn to leave other dogs alone,” Tong said now, but Ear only whined. Maybe he was chastising Ear for the wrong reason, Tong thought, and then he realized that he hadn’t heard the black dog bark. “Well, maybe it’s not the black dog, but someone else. You have to learn to leave others alone. Not all of them love you as you think they do,” Tong said.

They walked on the riverbank. The clouds were heavy in the sky. The wind brought a stale smell of old, unmelted snow. Tong stripped a layer of pale, starchy bark off a birch tree, and sat down with his stump of pencil. He wrote onto the bark the words he remembered from the announcement: Female. Counterrevolutionary. School.

Tong was one of the most hardworking students in his class. The teacher sometimes told the class that Tong was a good example of someone who was not bright but who made up for his shortcoming by thorough work. The comment had left Tong more sad than proud at first, but after a while he learned to cheer himself up: After all, praise from the teacher was praise, and an accumulation of these favorable comments could eventually make him an important pupil in the teacher’s eyes. Tong longed to be one of the first to join the Communist Young Pioneers after first grade so that he would earn more respect from the townspeople, and to realize that dream he needed something to impress his teachers and his peers. He had thought of memorizing every character from the elementary dictionary and presenting the result to the teacher at the end of the semester, but his parents, both workers, were not wealthy enough to give him an endless supply of exercise books. The idea of using the birch bark had occurred to Tong after he had read in a textbook that Comrade Lenin, while imprisoned, had used his black bread as an ink pot and his milk as ink, and had written out secret messages to his comrades; on the margins of newspapers, the messages would show up only when the newspaper was put close to fire; whenever a guard approached Lenin would devour his ink pot with the ink in it. “If you have a right heart, you’ll find the right way,” the teacher said of the story’s moral. Since then Tong had tried to keep the right heart and had gathered a handful of pencil stumps that other children had discarded. He had also discovered the birch bark, perfect for writing, a more steady supply than the paper Old Hua saved for him.

Ear sat down on his hind legs and watched Tong work for a while. Then the dog leapt out to the frozen river, leaving small flowerlike paw prints on the old snow. Tong wrote until his fingers were too cold to move. He blew big white breaths on them, and read the words to himself before putting away his pencil stump.

Tong looked back at the town. Red flags waved on top of the city hall and the courthouse. At the center of the city square, a stone statue of Chairman Mao dwarfed the nearby five-storied hospital. According to the schoolteachers, it was the tallest statue of Chairman Mao in the province, the pride of Muddy River, and had attracted pilgrims from other towns and villages. It was the main reason that Muddy River had been promoted from a regional town to a city that now had governing rights over several surrounding towns and villages. A few months earlier, not long after Tong’s arrival, a worker assigned to the semiannual cleaning of the statue had an accident and plummeted to his death from the shoulder of Chairman Mao. Many townspeople gathered. Tong was one of the children who had squeezed through the legs of adults to have a close look at the body—the man, in the blue uniform of a cleaning worker, lay face up with a small puddle of blood by his mouth; his eyes were wide open and glassy-looking, and his limbs stuck out at odd and impossible angles. When the orderlies from the city hospital came to gather the body, it slipped and shook as if it were boneless, reminding Tong of a kind of slug in his grandparents’ village—their bodies were fleshy and moist, and if you put a pinch of salt on their bodies, they would slowly become a small pool of white and sticky liquid. The child standing next to him was sick and was whisked away by his parents, and Tong willed himself not to act weakly. Even some grown-ups turned their eyes away when the orderlies had to peel the man’s head off the ground, but Tong forced himself to watch everything without missing a single detail. He believed if he was brave enough, the town’s boys, and perhaps the grown-ups too, would approve of him and accept him as one of the best among them. It was not the first time that Tong had seen a dead body, but never before had he seen a man die in such a strange manner. Back in his grandparents’ village, people died in unsurprising ways, from sickness and old age. Only once a woman, working in the field with a tank of pesticide on her back, was killed instantly when the tank exploded. Tong and other children had gathered at the edge of the field and watched the woman’s husband and two teenage sons hose down the body from afar until the fire was put out and the deadly gas dispersed; they seemed in neither shock nor grief, their silence suggesting something beyond Tong’s understanding.

Some people’s deaths are heavier than Mount Tai, and others’ are as light as a feather. Tong thought about the lesson his teacher had taught a few weeks before. The woman killed in the explosion had become a tale that the villagers enjoyed telling to passersby, and often the listeners would exclaim in awe, but would that give her death more weight than an old woman dying in her sleep in the lane next to Tong’s grandparents’? The counterrevolutionary’s death must be lighter than a feather, but the banners and the ceremony of the day all seemed to say differently.

The city came to life in the boy’s baffled gaze, some people more prepared than others for this important day. A fourth grader found to her horror that her silk Young Pioneer’s kerchief had been ripped by her little brother, who had bound it around his cat’s paw and played tug-of-war with the cat. Her mother tried to comfort her—didn’t she have a spare cotton one, her mother asked, and even if she wore the silk kerchief, nobody would notice the small tear—but nothing could stop the girl’s howling. How could they expect her, a captain of the Communist Young Pioneers in her class, to wear a plain cotton kerchief or a ripped one? The girl cried until it became clear that her tears would only make her look worse for the day; for the first time in her life, she felt its immense worthlessness, when a cat’s small paw could destroy the grandest dream.

A few blocks away, a truck driver grabbed his young wife just as she rose from bed. One more time, he begged; she resisted, but when she failed to free her arms from his tight grip, she lay open for him. After all, they could both take an extra nap at the denunciation ceremony, and she did not need to worry about his driving today. In the city hospital, a nurse arrived late for the morning shift because her son had overslept, and in a hurry to finish her work before going to the denunciation ceremony, she gave the wrong dose of antibiotics to an infant recovering from pneumonia; only years later would the doctors discover the child’s deafness, caused by the mistake, but it would remain uninvestigated, and the parents would have only fate to blame for their misfortune. Across the street in the communication building, the girl working the switchboard yelled at a peasant when he tried to call his uncle in a neighboring province; didn’t he know that today was an important day and she had to be fully prepared for the political event instead of wasting her time with him, she said, her harsh words half-lost in a bad connection; while she was berating him, the army hospital from the provincial capital called in, and this time the girl was shouted at because she was not prompt enough in picking up the call.

TWO

The girl was dressed in a dark-colored man’s suit, a size too big for her, her hair coiled up and hidden underneath a fedora hat of matching color. Her hands, clad in black gloves, held tightly on to the handle of a short, unsheathed sword. The blade pointed upward, the only object of light color in the black-and-white picture. The girl’s unsmiling face was half shadowed by the hat, her eyes looking straight into the camera. Think of how Autumn Jade was prepared to give up her life, Kai remembered her teacher explaining when she was chosen to play the famous heroine in a new opera. Kai was twelve then, a rising star in the theater school at the provincial capital, and it was not a surprise that she was given every major role, from Autumn Jade, who had been beheaded after a failed assassination of a provincial representative in the last emperor’s court, to Chen Tiejun, the young Communist who had been shot alongside her lover shortly after they had announced each other husband and wife in front of the firing squad. Kai had always been praised for her mature performances, but looking at her picture now, she could see little understanding in the girl’s eyes of the martyrs she had impersonated. Kai had once taken pride in entering adulthood ahead of her peers, but that adulthood, she could see now, was as false and untrustworthy as her youthful interpretation of death and martyrdom.

She returned the framed picture to the wall where it had hung for the past five years along with other pictures, relics of her life onstage between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. The studio, a small, windowless room on the top floor of the administration building, with padded walls and flickering fluorescent lights, had struck Kai at first as a place not much different from a prison cell. Han was the one who decorated the room, hanging up her pictures on the walls and a heart-shaped mirror behind the door, placing vases of plastic flowers on the shelves so they could bloom all year round without the need for sunshine or other care—to make the studio her very own, as Han insisted—when he helped her get the news announcer’s position. One more reason to consider his marriage proposal, Kai’s mother urged, thinking of other less privileged jobs that Kai could have been assigned to after her departure from the provincial theater troupe: teaching in an elementary school and struggling to make the children sing less cacophonously, or serving as one of those clerks who had little function other than filling the offices with pleasant feminine presence in the Cultural and Entertainment Department. Han, the only son of one of the most powerful couples in the city government, had been courting Kai for six months then, a perfect choice for her, according to her parents, who, both as middle-ranked clerks, had little status to help Kai, when younger faces had replaced Kai onstage. The most important success for a woman is not in her profession but in her marriage, Kai’s father said when she thought of leaving Muddy River and seeking an acting career in Beijing or Shanghai; it is more of a challenge to retain the lifelong attention of one audience than to win the hearts of many who would forget her overnight. In her mother’s absence, Kai’s father explained all this, and it was not only his insight into the ephemeral nature of fame but also his unmistakable indication that Kai’s mother—the more dominating and abusive one in their marriage—had failed, that made Kai reconsider her decision. A child who catches for the first time a glimpse of the darker side of her parents’ marriage is forced to enter the grown-up world, often against her nature and will, just as she was once pushed through a birth canal to claim her existence. For Kai, who had left home for the theater school at eight, this second birth came at a time when most of her school friends had ventured into marriage and early motherhood, and she made up her mind to marry into Han’s family. That Kai’s father had passed away shortly thereafter with liver cancer, discovered at a stage too late, had made the decision seem a worthy one, at least for the first year of the marriage.

Kai placed a record on the phonograph. The needle circled on the red disc, and dutifully the theme song for the morning news, “Love of the Homeland,” flooded out of loudspeakers onto every street corner. Kai imagined the world outside the broadcast studio: the dark coal smoke rising from rooftops into the lead-colored morning sky; sparrows jumping from one roof to the next, their wings dusty and their chirping drowned out by the patriotic music; the people underneath those roofs, used to the morning ritual of music and then the news broadcast. They would probably not hear a single word of the program.

The chorus ended, and Kai lifted the needle and turned on the microphone. “Good morning, workers, peasants, and all revolutionary comrades of Muddy River,” she began in her standard greeting, her well-trained voice at once warm and impersonal. She reported both international and national news, taken from People’s Daily and Reference Journal by a night-shift clerk in the propaganda department, followed by provincial news and local affairs. Afterward she picked up an editorial, denouncing the Vietnamese government for its betrayal of the true Communist faith, and hailing the ideological importance of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge despite the temporary setback brought about by the Vietnamese intrusion. While she was reading, Kai was aware of the note taped to the microphone, instructing her to announce to the townspeople Gu Shan’s denunciation ceremony, and her execution to follow.

Gu Shan was twenty-eight, the same age as Kai, and four years younger than Autumn Jade when she had been beheaded after a hasty trial. Autumn Jade had left two children who were too young to mourn her death, and a husband who had disowned her in defense of the last dynasty she had been fighting against. Kai had a husband and a son; Gu Shan had neither. The freedom to sacrifice for one’s belief was a luxury that few could afford, Kai thought. She imagined sneaking the words pioneer and martyr into the announcement of the execution. Would Shan, who was probably being offered her last breakfast and perhaps a change of clean clothes, hear the voice of a friend she had perhaps long ago ceased hoping for in her long years of imprisonment? Kai’s hands shook when she read the announcement. She and Shan were allies now, even though Shan would never know it.

Kai clicked off the microphone, and someone promptly knocked on the door, two short taps followed by a scratch. Kai checked her face in the mirror before opening the door.

“The best tonic for the best voice,” said Han, as he lifted the thermos and presented it with a theatrical gesture. Every morning, before Han went to his office in the same building, he stopped by the studio with a thermos of tea, brewed from an herb named Big Fat Sea and said to be good for one’s voice. It had begun as a habit of love after their honeymoon, and Kai had thought that it would cool down and eventually die as all unreasonable passions between a man and woman did. But five years and a child later, Han had not given up the practice. He must be the only husband in this town who would deliver tea to his wife, Han sometimes said, full of marvel and admiration, as if he himself was happily baffled by what he did; other people must think of him as a fool now, he said, out of self-mockery, yet it was the pride he did not conceal in the statement that filled Kai with panic. Getting married and becoming a mother had once seemed the most natural course for her life, but Kai could not help but wish, at times, that everything she had mistakenly decided could be wiped away.

“I’ve told you many times I don’t need it,” said Kai of the tea, and her reply, which often sounded like a loving reprimand, sounded more impatient to her ears today. Han seemed not to notice. He pecked her on the cheek, walked past her into the studio, and poured a mug of tea for her. “It’s an important day. I don’t want the world to hear that my wife’s voice is anything less than perfect.”

Kai smiled weakly, and when Han urged her to drink the tea, she took a sip. He gazed at her. How was his preparation for the day going, she asked, before he had a chance to compliment her beauty, as he often did.

“All set but for the helicopter,” Han replied.

The helicopter? Kai asked. Something that was not his responsibility, he said, and he left it at that. Kai asked, as if out of innocent curiosity, what he needed a helicopter for, and Han replied that he was sure someone would set things straight, she should not bother herself with his boring business. “Worrying makes one grow old,” he said, as a joke, and Kai said that perhaps it would soon be time for him to look for a younger woman. He laughed, taking Kai’s reply as a flirtation.

It amazed her that her husband never doubted her in any way. His faith and confidence in her—and more so in himself—made him a blind worshipper of their marriage. How easy it was to deceive a trusting soul, but the thought unsettled Kai. She looked at the clock, and said it was about time for her to go. She was expected to be at her position at the East Wind Stadium, one of the major sites for the denunciation ceremony, by eight. He would walk her there, Han said. Kai wished she had an excuse to reject his offer, but she said nothing.

She put a few pages of the news away and adjusted her hair before leaving the studio with him. Her husband placed a hand on her elbow, as if she needed his guidance and assistance to walk down the five flights of stairs, but when they exited the building, he let go of her, so that they would not be seen having any improper physical contact in public.

“So I’ll see you at Three Joy?” Han asked, as they turned at the street corner.

What for? Kai asked, and Han answered that it was the celebration banquet. Nobody had told her about it, Kai said, and Han replied that he thought she would have known by now that it was the regular thing after such an event. “The last couple of dinners, the mayor asked why you were not there,” Han said, and added that he had found excuses for her both times.

Kai could envision it: her place at the table with the mayor and his wife, Han and his parents and a few other families, a close-knit circle of status. It had been part of the allure of the marriage, that once she was a member of this family she would enter a social group that clerks like her parents had dreamed of reaching all their lives. Kai was unwilling to admit it now, but she knew that vanity was one of her costly errors. She was a presentable wife and daughter-in-law: good-looking, having had no other boyfriend before she met Han, and capable of giving birth to a son for the first baby. Her in-laws treated her well, but they would never hesitate to let her know that she was the one to have married up in the family.

She had told the nanny that she would be home around lunchtime, Kai said. The new nanny, having just started the week before, was fifteen and a half, too young to take care of a baby, in Kai’s opinion, but when the previous nanny had quit to go back to work on the land with her husband and sons—after many years of the people’s commune, the central government had finally allowed peasants to own the planting rights to their own land—a girl from the mountain village was the only one they could find as a replacement.

He would send his parents’ orderly to check on the nanny, Han said. What could an eighteen-year-old boy know about an eleven-month-old baby, Kai responded, and Han, detecting a trace of impatience in her words, studied her and asked if she was feeling all right. He squeezed her hand quickly before letting it go.

Kai shook her head and said she only worried about Ming-Ming. Han replied that he understood, but his parents would not be happy if she missed important social events. She nodded and said she would go if that was what he wanted. The baby had been an easy excuse for her distraction at the breakfast table, the dinners she missed at Han’s parents’ flat, fewer visits to her own mother, her tired apologies when Han asked for sex at night.

“My parents want you to be there,” said Han. “So do I.”

Kai nodded, and they resumed their walk in silence. A few blocks away they saw smoke rising at an intersection. A group of people had gathered, and there was a strong odor of burned leather in the air. A piece of silk, palm-sized and in a soft faded color, was carried across the street by the wind. An orange cat, stretching on a low wall, followed the floating fabric with its eyes.

Han asked the crowd to make way. A few people stood aside, and Kai followed her husband into the circle. A man sporting the red armband of the Workers’ Union security patrol was staring down at an old woman, who sat in front of a burning pile of clothes. She did not look up when Han asked her why she was blocking traffic on the important day of a political event.

“The old witch is playing deaf and mute,” the security patrol said, and added that his companion had gone to fetch the police.

Kai looked at the top of the old woman’s head, barely covered by thin gray hair. She bent down toward the old woman, and told her that she was violating a traffic regulation, that she’d better leave now. There was a slight ripple in the crowd as Kai spoke; in this town, people recognized Kai’s voice. When she stood up, she could feel the woman standing next to her inching away, so as to study her face at a better angle.

“You may still have a chance, if you walk away by yourself now,” Han said, and in a lower voice, he told Kai to go on to the ceremony, as he would wait for the police.

The old woman looked up. “You’ll all see her off in your way. Why can’t I see her off in mine?”

The security patrol explained to Han and Kai that this woman was the mother of the soon-to-be-executed counterrevolutionary. Only then did Kai recognize the defiance in Mrs. Gu’s eyes. She had seen the same expression in Shan’s eyes twelve years ago, when they had been in rival factions of the Red Guards.

“Our way to send your daughter off is not only the most correct way but also the only way permitted by law,” Han said, as he ordered the security patrol to fetch water. Mrs. Gu poked the fire with a tree branch, as if she had not heard him. When the patrol returned with a heavy bucket, Han stepped back and motioned the man to put out the fire. Mrs. Gu did not shield her face from the splashing water. The pile hissed and smoldered, but she poked it again as if she were willing the flame to catch again.

Two policemen, summoned by the other patrol, were now pushing through the crowd and shouting, telling people to move on. Some people left, but many only retreated and formed a bigger circle. “Let’s not make a big fuss out of this,” Kai said to Han, as he strode up to meet the policemen.

“Those who seek punishment will get what they ask for,” Han said.

The patrol greeted the police, and pointed out Han and Kai, but Mrs. Gu paid little attention to the men surrounding her, mumbling something before she wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.

“Why don’t you just let her go?” Kai said to Han, and she quoted an old saying, Favors one does will be returned to him, and pains one causes will be inflicted on him.

Han glanced at Kai, saying that he did not know that she could be superstitious.

“If you don’t want to believe in it for yourself, at least believe in it for your son,” Kai said. The urgency in her voice stopped Han, who looked at her with half-smiling eyes. He said he had never known she would take up the beliefs of the old generation.

“A mother needs all the help possible to ensure a good life for her child,” Kai said. “What if people direct curses at Ming-Ming because of what we do?”

Han shook his head, as if amused by his wife’s logic. He greeted the policemen and told them to escort the old woman home and find someone to clean up the street. “Let’s not make a big fuss this time,” he said, echoing Kai’s words and adding that there was no need to put additional stress on this day. The other men complimented Han for his generosity: More power to him who lets someone off without pursuing an error, the older policeman said, and Han nodded in agreement.

THREE

Mrs. Hua did not see the policemen remove Mrs. Gu from the site of her crime; nor would Mrs. Hua have realized, had she witnessed the scene, that the woman who was half dragged and half carried to the police jeep was Mrs. Gu.

Like Mrs. Hua herself, Mrs. Gu would never become a grandmother. Mrs. Hua was sixty-six, an age when a grandchild or two would provide a better reason to live on than the streets her husband scavenged and she swept, but the streets provided a living, while the dreams about grandchildren did not, and she was aware of the good fortune to be alive, for which she and her husband often reminded themselves to be grateful. Still, the urge to hold a baby sometimes became so strong that she had to pause what she was doing and feel, with held breath, the imagined weight of a small body, warm and soft, in her arms. This gave her the look of a distracted old woman. Once in a while her boss, Shaokang, a man in his fifties who had never married, would threaten to fire her, as if he was angry with her slow response to his requests, but she knew that he only said it for the sake of the other workers in the sanitation department, as he was one of those men who concealed his kindness behind harsh words. He had first offered her a job in his department thirteen years ago, when he had seen Mrs. Hua and her husband in the street, she running a high fever and he begging for a bowl of water from a shop. It was shortly after they had been forced to let the four younger girls be taken away to orphanages in four different counties, a practice believed to be good for the girls to start anew. Mrs. Hua and her husband had walked for three months through four provinces, hoping the road would heal their fresh wound. They had not expected to settle down in Muddy River, but Shaokang told them sternly that the coming winter would certainly kill both of them if they did not accept his offer, and in the end, the will to live on ended their journey.

“The crossroad at Liberation and Yellow River,” said Shaokang, when Mrs. Hua came into the department, a room the size of a warehouse, with a desk in the corner to serve as an office area. She went to the washstand and rinsed the basin. There was little paste left; he had given her much more flour than needed, but she knew he would not question the whereabouts of the leftover flour.

Mrs. Hua went to the closet but most brooms had not yet been returned by the road crew. When all present, the brooms, big ones made out of bamboo branches and small ones made out of straw, would stand up in a line, like a platoon of soldiers, each bearing a number in Shaokang’s neat handwriting and assigned to a specific sweeper. Sometimes Mrs. Hua wondered if in one of Shaokang’s thick notebooks he had a record of all the brooms that had passed through the sanitation department: how much time they had spent in the street and how much they had idled in the closet; how long each broom lasted before its full head went bald. The younger sweepers in the department joked behind Shaokang’s back that he loved the brooms as his own children, but Mrs. Hua saw nothing wrong in that and knew that the joke would come only from young people who understood little of parenthood.

Mrs. Hua picked up the brooms that belonged to her and told Shaokang that the night before she had dreamed of painting red eggs for a grandchild’s birthday. Mrs. Hua spoke to Shaokang only when there was no one around. Sometimes it would be days or weeks before they had a chance to talk, but neither found anything odd in that, their conversations no more than a few words.

“A dream is as real as a blossom in the mirror or a full moon in the river,” said Shaokang. He did not look up from the notebook he was studying. Mrs. Hua sighed in agreement and headed to the door. Earlier that morning she had told the same dream to her husband, and he had replied that it was a good dream, if nothing else.

“Do you want some time off today?” Shaokang asked.

Why would she, replied Mrs. Hua. He worried that the denunciation ceremony might bore Mrs. Hua, Shaokang said, and added that enough workers would be representing the sanitation department. As if boredom was something that people like her should be concerned about, Mrs. Hua thought, but she could use a day off to help her husband sort out the bottles that had been accumulating in their shed. Indeed, she was trying to fight off a cold, Mrs. Hua said, lying for the sake of the office desk and the brooms and the four empty walls. Shaokang nodded and said that after she cleaned up the crossroad she need not report to the denunciation ceremony.

The pile at the intersection was scattered by the indifferent tramping shoes of adults as well as the kicking feet of children for whom the half-burned fabric and scorched shoes all provided endless amusement. Mrs. Hua shooed a few persistent children away and cleaned the street while thinking about her dream from the night before.

“Morning, Mrs. Hua,” a voice whispered to her, too close to her ears.

Mrs. Hua, startled, saw Bashi, that good-for-nothing idler, smile at her. She mumbled that she wished he had better things to do than frighten old folks in the street.

“Frighten? I didn’t mean to. I was only going to remind you that Old Hua might be waiting for you at home.”

“Home? Rubbish collectors do not boast about home,” said Mrs. Hua. “It’s a temporary nest.”

“But my home is your home, Mrs. Hua. I’ve told my grandma many times that you and Old Hua could move in with us any day you like. You know she’s a bit lonely and wouldn’t mind some old friends around,” Bashi said, looking sincerely into Mrs. Hua’s eyes.

Mrs. Hua shook her head and said, “Nobody believes your sweet talk except your grandma.”

“I mean it, Mrs. Hua. Ask anyone in town. Everyone knows I am generous about my wealth, and ready to help anyone in need.”

“Your wealth? That’s the money your father earned with his life.”

Bashi shrugged and did not bother to refute the old woman.

“Son, don’t you worry about your future?”

“What do I have to worry about?” Bashi said.

“What can you do, son?” she said. “I worry about you.”

“I can go rubbish collecting with Old Hua,” Bashi said. “I can sweep the streets with you too. I’m a hard worker. See my muscles. Here and here. I’ll tell you, Mrs. Hua, it’s not a joke to lift dumbbells every morning.” There were neither dumbbells nor muscles worth bragging about, but such stories came readily and convincingly to Bashi.

“Street sweeping is a hard job to get now,” Mrs. Hua said. In the past two years, the end of the Cultural Revolution had brought many young people back from the countryside, where they had been sent over the past decade. Even a street sweeper’s position was something people fought over now. She would not be surprised one of these days to find herself replaced.

“There’s no permit required to go rubbish collecting,” Bashi said. “That’s an easy thing to do.”

“It’s a hard life.”

“I don’t mind. Honestly, Mrs. Hua, I would love to go rubbish collecting, and baby collecting too, with you.”

Mrs. Hua gathered the wet ashes on the ground without replying. It had been years since she and her husband had given up the seven girls they had found in their wandering lives as rubbish collectors, and she did not know what continued to capture the young man’s interest, when the story had long ago lived out its due in people’s gossip and curiosity. He asked them often, and she never offered much to satisfy him.

“Would Old Hua and you bring up a baby girl again if you found a live one now?”

Mrs. Hua looked at the sky and thought about the question. Hard as she tried—often at night when she was unable to sleep—she could not summon up clear images of the seven faces. How could she forget their looks when she had raised them from rag-covered little creatures left by the roadside? But old age played tricks, dulling her memory as well as her eyes.

“Would you, say, keep an eye out for a baby girl?” Bashi persisted.

Mrs. Hua shook her head. “Too hard a life. A hard life for everybody.”

“But I could bring up the girl along with you, Mrs. Hua. I have the money. I can work too. I’m young.”

Mrs. Hua studied Bashi with her cataract-bleared eyes. Bashi stood straighter and arranged his hat. The young man in front of her had not had the first taste of hardship in life, Mrs. Hua thought, and said so to Bashi.

“I lost my parents when I was young,” Bashi said. “I’m as much an orphan as your girls were before you picked them up.”

Caught off guard, Mrs. Hua could not think of what to say. She had not known that Bashi would remember his parents. After a moment, she said, “Better to have left them to die in the first place.”

“Where are your daughters now?” Bashi asked. “How old are they?”

“Wherever their fates have brought them to. Where else can they be?”

“Where is that?” Bashi persisted.

“Three of them we left with people who were willing to take them in as child brides. The four younger ones were confiscated by the government and sent to orphanages because we were not the legal parents. What do you think of that, son?” Mrs. Hua said, unaware of her raised voice. “We fed them spoonful by spoonful and brought them up and then we were told it was illegal to keep them in the first place. Better just to let them die from the start.”

Bashi sighed. “It makes no sense, this life, does it?”

Mrs. Hua did not reply. Bashi repeated the line to himself and let it stay in the air between them for a beat longer.

NINI SLOWED DOWN when she approached the alley where Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu lived. She had managed to get to the railway station in time, and the workers had given her coal and then shooed her away. None of them seemed to like her, and she often wondered if someday they would find her unbearably ugly and change their minds. That had not happened, but she often worried about it.

She worried too about Mrs. Gu’s hospitality. For the past two years, Mrs. Gu had never failed to show up where her alley joined the street. Standing by a half-dead plum tree, she would put a hand on the trunk and swing her legs, one and then another, as if she were doing some halfhearted exercises, and when people walked past her she did not greet them. At the sight of Nini, Mrs. Gu would nod imperceptibly and turn toward her alley, and Nini would know that she was welcome in the house for another day.

This morning ritual had started not long after Nini’s parents had made her responsible for providing coal. Since the Gus’ house was out of Nini’s way, Mrs. Gu had been the one to seek Nini out one morning, asking politely if she would like a few bites of breakfast before going home. Nini thought the invitation odd and suspicious, but a hungry child all her life, she found it hard to turn away.

Nini did not know why Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu invited her to breakfast. They seldom talked between themselves, at least when she was around. They asked her about her family once in a while, and when Nini offered the briefest answers to their questions, they did not press for more information, so Nini knew they had no more interest in the topic than she did. Teacher Gu ate fast, and while waiting for Nini to finish her breakfast, he folded a frog out of the piece of paper he had ripped off the calendar and had kept neat and flat on the table. For your sisters, Teacher Gu said when he placed the paper frog in her hand, though she never passed it on to them. She had thought of keeping all the paper frogs but there was no corner in her house to save anything. In the end, she left them in the rubbish can, picked up later by Old Hua, unfolded, and sold to the recycling station.

Nini always worried that one day Teacher Gu and Mrs. Gu would stop caring about her, and her bowl would be missing from the table. When she saw now that no one was standing next to the half-dead plum tree she wondered, for a second, if Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu had overslept; they could have gotten ill also, she thought, old people as they were, their bodies no longer reliable. Still, her instincts told her that they must have stopped wanting her around, and she decided to go to the Gus’ house, if only to make sure that was true.

Several steps into the alley a police jeep drove toward Nini with short impatient honks, and she hurried to make way for the vehicle, almost twisting her bad foot. When the jeep turned out of the alley Nini said a curse she had picked up at the marketplace—even though she understood little of its meaning, it fitted her mood and she used it often. She lingered in front of the Gus’ gate for a few minutes and made small coughing sounds, but neither Mrs. Gu nor Teacher Gu rushed out of the gate to apologize for their lateness. Nini pushed the gate ajar and let herself into the yard. The front room was unlit, and the window that faced the yard was covered with thick layers of old newspaper for insulation. Nini looked in, but could see nothing through the opaque newsprint. “Mrs. Gu,” she said quietly, then raised her voice a little. “Teacher Gu.” When no one answered, she tried the door, and it opened without a sound. The front room, dark and cold, was lit only by a long stripe of orange light on the floor that came from the half-closed door of the bedroom. “Mrs. Gu,” said Nini. “Are you feeling all right today?”

The bedroom door opened and Mrs. Gu stood in the frame, a dark silhouette. “Go home now, Nini,” she said in a flat voice. “We don’t owe you any more. Never come to my door again.”

Nini had been waiting for moments like this all her life. She was not surprised, but relieved. She had not made a mistake: People changed their minds all the time, often without a reason. She sucked the inside of her mouth hard and did not move. She could not see Mrs. Gu’s face in the dark shadow, but any moment now the old woman would come closer, grab her arms, and push her out of the door, and Nini’s small body tensed up at the expectation. She wondered whether Mrs. Gu’s hands would feel differently on her face than her own mother’s slapping. “Nini,” Teacher Gu said, appearing behind Mrs. Gu, his voice gentler. He walked past Mrs. Gu and took the rope off Nini’s shoulder. She let the basket go and followed him to an old desk that served as both the kitchen counter and a dinner table. There was no porridge and no pickled cabbage waiting. Teacher Gu looked around, and before he spoke, there came a muffled cry from Mrs. Gu in their bedroom. He rubbed his hands. “Mrs. Gu is not feeling well today,” he said. “I’ll be back, and you wait here.”

Nini nodded. When Teacher Gu closed the bedroom door behind him, she tried the two drawers at the side of the desk. From the dim light coming through the newsprint that covered the window, Nini could see that the first drawer was filled with chopsticks, cutting knives, matchbooks, candles, used batteries, and other knickknacks. She shut it without making a sound and opened the other one: a few pencils, a black velvet box, some scratch paper, a thick notebook in which many receipts were pasted, a plastic barrette. Nini opened the box and found a fountain pen inside; she stroked the smooth and dark blue body before putting it back into the box. She then picked up the barrette and slipped it into her own pocket; Mrs. Gu deserved this. The two hens, quiet and forgotten by Nini, scratched and cooed; startled, she almost gave out a cry. When no one came, she paged through the notebook. There was a loose receipt, and she pocketed it too, just in time before Teacher Gu came out of the bedroom. He turned on the lamp and Nini blinked in the sudden harshness of the light. He walked to the cabinet and took out a tin of biscuits. “Nini, take the biscuits with you,” said Teacher Gu. “For you and your sisters.”

Nini looked up at Teacher Gu, and his eyes, tired and sad, seemed not to register her presence. She thought about the receipt in her pocket, something he would be looking for later; if he said a few kind words to apologize for Mrs. Gu, Nini thought, she would find a way to sneak the receipt back into the drawer, or just drop it by the door.

Teacher Gu did not notice her hesitation. He picked up her basket. “Mrs. Gu is not feeling well these days, and she does not wish to see you for some time,” Teacher Gu said, pushing Nini gently out of the door. “Don’t come back to see us until Mrs. Gu feels better.”

In the street Nini opened the tin and put a biscuit in her mouth. The biscuit tasted sweet and stale. Teacher Gu had changed his mind too, dismissing her with a tin of biscuits that must have been sitting on the shelf for ages. Nini took the receipt out and looked at the red official stamp on it. She could not read, but a red stamp must mean something important, which made her happy. She squeezed the receipt into a small ball and threw it into a nearby dumpster. She took out another biscuit, nibbling and walking slowly home when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

Nini turned and saw a familiar face that belonged to a young man who spent most of his days wandering in and out of the marketplace. She stepped back and looked at him.

“Nini’s your name, isn’t it?” he said, baring his yellow and crooked teeth.

She nodded.

“You must be wondering how I know your name,” said the man. “Do you want to know how I know your name?”

Nini shook her head.

“And you have five sisters. Do you want to know what else I know about you?”

Nini stared at the young man without replying. On another day, in a different mood, she might ask the young man who he thought he was to bother with other people’s business. She had heard grown-ups talk this way and she believed she had learned the right tone, impatient, and with authority. At least, when she talked to her sisters in that tone, they all seemed intimidated. She could make the young man speechless and embarrassed, but she was not in the mood for that today. The only thing she wanted to do was to bite the inside of her mouth until she could taste blood.

“If your mother gives birth to another daughter, they will become the Heavenly Emperor and Empress, do you know why?”

Nini shook her head.

“Only the Heavenly Emperor and Empress gave birth to seven daughters, the Seven Fairy Sisters,” said the man. “Ha.”

The man waited for her to laugh. He seemed disappointed when she did not. “My name is Bashi, Eighty.”

What an odd thing to have a number as his name, Nini thought. She wondered if the man had any brothers and sisters, and if they had names like Seventy, Sixty, and Fifty. As if he had guessed her question, the man said, “You know why Bashi is my name? Because I ate eighty dumplings the day I was born.”

Nini knew it was a joke too, but it was not funny, and she decided not to smile.

“Are you a mute?” Bashi said.

“Of course not. What a stupid question.”

“Good, you can speak. How old are you?”

“It’s none of your business,” Nini said.

“I’m nineteen—well, nineteen and a quarter. I was born in July. July 7, an important day, because I was born on that day. Have you seen a history textbook? It lists all the birthdays of all important people, and someday it will include mine.”

Nini shifted the coal basket to another shoulder. She knew enough not to believe his words, but nobody had wanted to talk to her at this length before.

“How old are you? If you don’t tell me, I’ll have to guess.”

“Twelve,” Nini said. She did not know why the man was so persistent.

“Twelve? Wonderful.”

“What’s wonderful?”

Bashi looked baffled by Nini’s question. “Do you want to come and chat with me?” he said.

“Why?”

Bashi scratched his scalp hard and Nini watched big flakes of dandruff fall. “You can come to talk to me so you don’t have to walk all the way to the railway station for coal. What you’re doing is really stealing, I’m sure you know that. Nobody saying anything about it now doesn’t mean someone won’t pursue you in the future. Wait and see. Any day now they may come and charge you with stealing from state property. ‘What a pity,’ people will say. ‘What a nice little girl but look at the trouble she’s got herself into.’ Do you want to be caught like a thief? And paraded around town in a cage for people to throw stones at?” Bashi asked. “We have plenty of coal in our house. My grandmother and I live together, and she likes to talk to little girls like you. We can buy extra coal for you to bring home, and you don’t even have to tell your parents. Think about it, all right?”

Nobody had ever used nice to describe her, and for a moment Nini wondered if the man was blind. But he was right that what she did was not legal. It had not occurred to her before, but she wondered now whether it was the reason she was sent to do it. She imagined the policemen coming to arrest her. Her parents would be relieved, and her sisters would celebrate because a competing mouth was eliminated from the dinner table. Mrs. Gu and Teacher Gu might not even wonder what had happened to her. The neighbors and strangers would all say it was their good fortune that the ugly girl had finally been plucked out of their life. No one would miss her.

Bashi told her again to think about what he could offer. Nini did not understand why people decided to be nice or, more often, mean to her. She imagined a house with good, solid lumps of coal. A few men and women walked past them in the street, all wearing their best Mao jackets and carrying colorful banners in their gloved hands. Some of them looked at Nini’s companion with disdain, but most ignored him. Bashi seemed not to notice. He grinned and waved back at them. “Morning, Uncles and Aunties. Are you having a parade today? For the execution?” he said. “Who’s this woman, anyway? Does anyone know her story?”

When none of the adults replied, Bashi turned back to Nini. “They are executing someone today. A woman. Think about it. One can’t commit a crime and think one can run away without punishment.” Then, in a lower voice, he added, “Say, do you want to come and chat with me?”

“Where?”

“Come with me. I can show you my house now.”

Nini shook her head. It was getting late, and her mother would be cursing her and her bad leg for being slow. “I need to go home,” she said.

“Will you be free after breakfast? I’ll wait for you upriver, by the old willow tree. You know that place?”

The willow was an old, gnarled tree with a full head of branches, like a madwoman. It was quite a walk from Nini’s home, past half the town, past the birch woods on the riverbank, until one could see not the low row houses but the high chimneys of the generation plant. Nini had been there before Little Sixth’s birth; she had not been charged with most of the chores then, and in the spring, sometimes she had been sent to dig new dandelions and shepherd’s purses. Through the spring and early summer, her family ate the edible grass, boiled in water and salted heavily; they ate it long past the season, until their mouths were filled with bitter, hard fibers. The memory made Nini’s mouth full of the grassy taste.

“How about it?” Bashi said. He looked at her as if her face were any other girl’s face, her mouth not skewed to the left, her eyes not drooping in the same direction. Her left hand and left foot were bad too, but he seemed not to have noticed them either. “Are you coming?”

Nini nodded.

“Great,” Bashi said. He took a biscuit out of the tin in Nini’s hand and popped it into his mouth before he walked away.

TEACHER GU STARTED the fire and poured water on the leftover rice. He watched the yellow flame lick the bottom of the pot, the murmuring of the water inside soothingly hypnotic. A grain of sand is as complete as a world, he said to the fire, his voice audible only to his own ears. The thought that someone sitting above the clouds could gaze into this small cocoon in which he and his wife were trapped in pain comforted him; their suffering to the eyes above could be as tiny and irrelevant as the piece of coal in his own eyes, a burning ember that would soon cool into a gray ball of ash.

The water boiled, and the lid of the pot let out sighs of white steam. Teacher Gu stirred the rice and sat down at the table. There was no sound from the bedroom, and he wondered if his wife had been falling into sleep; she had been escorted back by two policemen earlier, and they had made some harsh threats before taking off her handcuffs. He had worried that she would become hysterical, but she had kept herself still until the moment Nini arrived, the last person in the world who should be receiving his wife’s anger.

Teacher Gu’s hands probed around on the table as if they belonged to a blind man. Over the years he had developed a habit of busying his hands with anything they could reach, a sign of some disturbing psychological problem perhaps, but Teacher Gu tried not to dwell on it. Apart from a bowl of leftover soup, the table was empty. Another broken ritual, Teacher Gu thought, gone with Nini and the folding of a paper frog out of the calendar. It had started when Shan was fourteen, a young Red Guard ready to rip the world apart. He had folded paper compulsively, his busy fingers saving him from the sorrow of watching his daughter transform before his own eyes into a coldhearted stranger. At breakfast on an early summer day, when Shan had given a speech on how he should bow to the revolutionary youths instead of resisting with his silence, he made the paper frog jump and it landed in his wife’s unfinished porridge. Neither Mrs. Gu nor Teacher Gu removed the frog, and he knew then that they would never laugh together as a family again. On the same morning, when Shan’s young revolutionary friends came over, she suggested that they go out and “kick the bottoms of some counterrevolutionaries.” So easily she had let these vulgar words slip out, this daughter whom he had taught to recite poetry from the Tang dynasty since she was very young. Later, someone came to his school with the news that besides booting some people’s bottoms, Shan had also kicked the belly of a woman eight months pregnant. Teacher Gu hid himself in his office and wrote a long essay, a meditation on the failing of poetry as education in an unpoetic age. Upon finishing and rereading the essay, he tossed it into the fire and braced himself to face his wife, with whom he shared the responsibility of having brought a near murderer into this world.

How Shan had escaped the consequences of her action was beyond Teacher Gu’s understanding. His wife began to break down and weep often, first thing in the morning or sometimes in the middle of a savorless meal. What wrong had she done to deserve Shan? his wife asked him. Was heaven punishing them because they had both been married before and thus brought impurity to their marriage? This notion was superstitious nonsense, Teacher Gu wanted to remind his wife, but she was lost too, led astray by the belief that she herself was responsible for the crimes committed by their daughter. In his quiet disapproval she grew into an ordinary, witless woman, trying to find a reason for every calamity and failure, as if the world were explainable and life would have to make sense for one to continue living.

Teacher Gu shook his head. He was no better than she, he told himself. He was a man who had foolishly let himself be deceived by his own wishes. When he had first met his wife, she had just stopped belonging to her previous husband, as one of his five wives. She was the only one to leave the family of her own will when the newly established Communist government banned polygamy; the other wives had to be dragged away from the family by government officials. She was the first one to enroll in Teacher Gu’s class for illiterate women—she was eighteen that year, her hair black and smooth as silk, her cheeks peach-colored, and her eyes two deep wells of sad water. She was born with an ill-favored face, people in town warned Teacher Gu when he decided to marry her. Look at her cheekbones, which are too high, her lips, which are not full enough, people said. He shrugged off their comments. Ill-fortuned she was, losing her parents at twelve, sold to a husband by her uncle at fourteen, serving a man forty years her senior as half wife and half handmaiden, but Teacher Gu did not want to listen to any of the talk. Husband and wife were birds of the same fate—so said the ancient poems. Wasn’t it why they had become husband and wife in the first place? The day they got married, his first wife sent a telegram to him; keep each other alive with your own water, said the message. He hid the telegram, even though his new wife was not yet able to read all the characters in it. He never told her about the blessing, nor the fable behind those few words—two fish, husband and wife, were stranded in a puddle; they competed to swallow as much water as they could before the puddle vanished in the scorching sun so that they could keep each other alive in their long suffering before death by giving water to their loved one.

It was not a surprise that Teacher Gu and his first wife, being in love, had wished to be the two fish in the story, nor was it a wonder that this wish, along with other dreams and plans, was left unspoken at the end of their marriage. Nothing went wrong except, as she put it in her application for divorce, their marriage could not live up to the demands of the new society, she as a model Communist Party member, he a counterrevolutionary intellectual once serving in the Nationalist government as an education expert. She stayed in the university after the divorce, the first female mathematics professor in the tri-province area, later promoted to be president of a prestigious college in Beijing; he, the founder of the first Western-style high school in the province, was demoted to the local elementary school. If husband and wife were indeed birds of the same fate, he was not a good match for his first wife. He wished her better fortune in finding a husband appropriate for her position, someone approved by the party, or, even better, someone assigned by the party. But she remained single, childless. He never gathered enough courage to ask why. They exchanged a letter or two each year, saying little, because he felt that he had nothing, or too much, to say. Her letters were plain greetings for him and his family, and he dared not imagine her anguish beneath the calm politeness.

Teacher Gu’s first marriage had lasted three years, and what he remembered, afterward, was many of their intellectual talks. Even on their honeymoon they had spent more time reading and discussing Kant than enjoying the beach resort. Early in his second marriage, he would sometimes watch his young wife asleep at night and hope that she would eventually offer more than her physical beauty, that he would be able to share his intellectual life with her—he was then thirty-two, still too young to understand how limitless men’s desires were, or the absurdity of such greed.

When he had finally come to terms with what he could expect from his young wife, he did not love her less. He felt more responsible for her, not only as a husband and a man, but also as a parent and educator. He had always thought of her as his first child, before Shan and the other children they could not save—their firstborn, a baby boy, had lived for three days, and when Shan was two they had made one more effort that ended with a miscarriage. They gave up after that, counting it their blessing that they had Shan, a healthy, strong, and beautiful girl.

A son might have been different, Teacher Gu thought now, a son who would have grown up into an intelligent young man, someone with whom he could have had a true conversation. A son would take care of his parents on this day of loss, and for all the days that were coming. But these were foolish thoughts, wishing for something in vain. He’d better put a stop to such irrational wanderings of his mind. Teacher Gu opened the drawer. He had not done his bookkeeping since the previous day.

He paged through the notebook carefully, but there was no trace of the receipt. He went over the day before in his mind, the two officials, not impolite, and the pink, yellow, and white copies of the receipt they had produced. It had never occurred to Teacher Gu that he and his wife were to pay for the bullet that would take their daughter’s life, but why question such absurdity when it was not his position to ask? He signed, and counted out the price of the bullet, twenty-four cents, for the two men. The price of two pencils, or a few ears of corn—what he had often bought for his poorer students. He remembered folding the receipt once in the middle and putting it into the notebook when his wife came back from the market, a cabbage and a radish in her string bag. In the alley, she did not question the two men leaving; perhaps she had not seen them, or perhaps she had already guessed who they were. He and his wife had not talked about Shan’s case since the appeal had been turned down.

Teacher Gu went over the notebook again. His wife never touched it, trusting him with all monetary matters. He himself had not opened the notebook since last night. “It must be taking a walk with a ghost,” a familiar voice said to Teacher Gu, and for a moment he was startled but then he recognized his nanny’s voice from decades ago. She had been a servant for his grandparents, and she called him Young Master, but she was more like his mother—his own mother had been the headmistress of a boarding school for girls and had spent most of her time fund-raising for students from poor families to receive secondary education. Your mother is more capable than a man, he remembered his nanny saying with admiration. She herself, like the generation of women from her background, did not have any education, but she had theories and explanations for the smallest incidents in life. A misplaced hairpin must be taking a walk with a ghost, so too a lost coin or a missing tin soldier; sometimes the ghosts returned the runaway items but to different locations, because ghosts were forgetful, which also explained the permanent disappearance of things. She had a husky voice, which she said was a result of having cried too much over her husband and children, all of them caught in an epidemic of cholera. Gone to pay off their debts, she would talk about her family as if their deaths had just been another ordinary circumstance that required some straightforward explanation.

Teacher Gu closed his eyes; in his drowsiness he felt as if he had been returned to his childhood, nodding off on the stories told in an unhurried manner by the nanny.

The bedroom door opened, and before Teacher Gu could put away the notebook, his wife rushed to the stove and moved the pot away from the fire. The porridge had long ago stopped gurgling, and the front room was filled with a heavy, smoky smell. Teacher Gu looked at his wife apologetically, but she averted her eyes and scooped the meal out for them both, the less burned portion for him and the black bottom for herself.

They ate without talking and without tasting either. When they had both finished, she got up and washed the bowls. He waited until she finished. “Nini’s done nothing wrong. You should not treat her like that.”

The words, once out of his mouth, sounded more accusing than he had intended. His wife stared at him. He tried to soften his voice. “What I mean is, after all, we’ve done more harm to her and her family. They’ve done nothing to us.”

“They’re part of the world that will celebrate your daughter’s murder,” his wife said. “Why do we have to feel that we owe other people, when we’re owed more than anybody?”

“What I own is my fortune; what I’m owed is my fate,” Teacher Gu answered. The words sounded soothing and he repeated them one more time to himself, in a low, chanting voice. His wife did not reply and shut herself in the bedroom.

NINI FINISHED all the biscuits and threw the tin away before she pushed open the gate. Unlike most families in Muddy River, hers did not have a rudimentary storage shed in their small yard. She poured the coal into a wooden crate covered by an old tarpaulin. The white hen, one of the two that her family owned, flapped its wings and leapt onto the crate. With a smack Nini sent the bird fluttering to the ground. The nosiest creature in the world, the white hen came to check on the coal every morning as if she had been assigned by Nini’s mother to supervise her; in a low admonishing voice, Nini told it to mind its own business. The white hen strolled away, unruffled.

In the front room that served as a kitchen, Nini’s mother was cooking over hot oil, and Nini wrinkled her nose at the unusual aroma. The other hen of the family, a brown one that was not as diligent as the white hen in laying eggs, flapped her wings when she saw Nini come in, though her legs, bound together and tied to a stool, forbade her to move far. Without turning to look at Nini, her mother raised her voice over the sizzling pan and asked what had made Nini late. Nini, expecting her mother’s anger, and a punishment with no breakfast, spoke haltingly of the long wait in the railway station, but her mother seemed not to hear her.

Inside the bedroom, Nini’s father and her sisters sat around the table on their brick bed. The small wooden bed table was the only good furniture they owned; the rest of the house was filled with cardboard boxes that served as closets, trunks, and cabinets. The brick bed was where every family function took place, and the bed table served as their dinner table, her sisters’ desk for homework, as well as their workbench. Nini’s father worked in the heavy-metal factory and her mother packed ginseng and mushrooms in the wholesale section of the agricultural department; they earned barely enough to feed Nini and her five sisters, and clothes were passed down in order, from the parents to Nini and then to the rest of the girls. Every evening, the family sat together around the bed table and folded matchboxes to earn extra money. Even the three-year-old was given a small batch to finish. Besides the baby, Nini was the only one who did not fold matchboxes. Her bad hand made her useless for the job, and it was made clear to her many times that she was living not only on her parents’ blood and sweat but also on that of her younger sisters.

The fire had been built up in the belly of the brick bed. Nini’s father was sipping cheap yam liquor from a cup, but he did not look as gloomy as he did when he drank in the evenings. Her mother came in with a plate of fried bread. Nini was shocked to find such an extravagant breakfast.

Nini’s father beckoned to her and said, “Come on. If you don’t hurry, we’ll finish yours for you.”

Her sisters all giggled, a little nervously at first, more boldly when their mother did not shout and tell them to stay quiet. Even Little Sixth was making loud and happy noises. Nini’s father dipped the end of his chopsticks into the liquor, and then let the liquid drip into the baby’s mouth. Nini’s mother raised her voice to stop him but only in a laughing and approving way. The three-year-old and the five-year-old clamored and asked for a taste of the liquor, and their father gave them each drops of liquor too. The two older girls, already in school, knew better and did not ask, but they both sat close to their father. Lately they had begun to compete for his attention, the second daughter running to get his slippers and tea when he came home. But hard as she tried, replacing their mother in many ways to care for their father, Nini could see that she was no rival for the third daughter. The eight-year-old was a barometer of their father’s mood—when he was in a good humor, she acted as if she had been his only love, demanding more attention with soft whining and intimate gestures; when he was in a bad mood, she kept to herself and tiptoed around the house.

Nini climbed up on the bed. She huddled at the corner of the table farthest from her mother and asked the ten-year-old, “What happened to the brown hen?”

“We’ll make a chicken stew tonight for celebration,” her mother answered. “Feast on. Every wronged soul has a day to be compensated. I’m happy to see the day finally come.”

Every spring, peasants from the mountain came down to Muddy River with bamboo baskets full of new chicks, yellow, fluffy, all chirping and pecking. Young children timidly asked for one or two as their pets and were surprised when their parents paid for ten or fifteen. The chicks died fast, breaking many children’s hearts, but by the time summer came, with luck a few chickens would still be alive, among them a hen or two that would soon begin to lay eggs. Nini’s parents did not have the money to buy in large numbers, so they farmed out Nini’s sisters to watch the chicks in the spring so that they would not be devoured by hungry stray cats. In the evenings, when Nini cooked for the family, her sisters helped the neighbors round up the chickens for the night. Sometimes a family had an extra chicken left by the end of the summer, and they would give it to Nini’s family. The transaction was based on trust and understanding, but the neighbors were often left with none after a whole season, and no one could be blamed for that.

Nini thought about the brown hen, which liked to peck around Nini when she washed the family laundry in the yard, in the warmer season. It did not surprise Nini that her mother would choose to kill the brown hen over the white one. Nini had never tasted chicken before, and she wished the brown hen was not the first she would be eating.

Nini’s father downed another cup of liquor. Despite his heavy drinking, he was gentle with Nini’s mother and never beat her as other drinkers in the neighborhood did their wives. Except for the eight-year-old, most of the time he ignored the rest of his daughters. He sighed often, and sometimes wept while drinking alone at night, when he believed that the girls had fallen asleep. Nini stole glances at him on those nights from her corner of the bed. Her mother, leaving him alone as if his tears did not exist, folded matchboxes quietly.

“Let me tell all of you,” Nini’s mother said. “Always be kind to others. Heaven has an eye for mean people. They never escape their punishments.”

Nini’s sisters nodded eagerly. Their mother lovingly slapped the biggest piece of fried bread onto their father’s plate. “That whore of Gu’s is your example,” she said. “Learn the lesson.”

“Who’s the whore?” asked the eight-year-old.

Nini’s mother poured another cup of liquor for her husband, and a cup for herself. Nini had never seen her mother touch alcohol, but she now sipped the liquor with relish. “Nini, don’t think your parents are unfair to you and make you work like a slave. Everybody has to be useful in some way. Your sisters will marry when they are old enough, and their husbands will take care of them for the rest of their lives.”

The eight-year-old grinned at Nini in a haughty way that made Nini wish she could slap the girl.

“You, however, won’t find someone willing to marry you,” Nini’s mother continued. “You have to make yourself useful to your father and me, do you understand?”

Nini nodded and squeezed her bad hand beneath her leg. She liked to sit on her bad hand until it fell asleep. In those moments the hand was like someone else’s, and she had to touch each finger to know it was there.

“Someone has put a curse on us through you, Nini, and that’s why we never get to have a boy in our family. But today, the one who has done this to us gets to see her final day. The spell is over now, and your father and I will have a son soon,” their mother said, and their father held out a hand to stroke her belly. She smiled at him before turning to the girls. “You’ve all heard of the denunciation ceremony today, haven’t you?” she said.

The ten-year-old and the eight-year-old replied that they were going with their school, and Nini’s mother seemed satisfied with the answer. “You too, Nini, take Little Fourth, Little Fifth, and Little Sixth to the East Wind Stadium.”

Nini thought about the young man Bashi in the street, and the willow tree past the birch woods by the river. “Why, Mama?” asked the eight-year-old.

“Why? Because I want all my daughters to see what happens to that whore,” her mother said, and divided her own bread into four pieces, and handed them to all of Nini’s sisters but not to Nini or the baby.

Nini’s father put down his cup. His face was flushed, and his eyes seemed unable to focus. “Let me tell you this story, and all of you will have to remember it from now on. Your mother and I, we grew up together in a village in Hebei Province, where your uncles and aunts still live. Your mother and I—we fell in love when we were in the fifth grade.”

The ten-year-old looked at the eight-year-old, and both giggled, the younger one bolder than the other. Nini’s mother blushed. “What are you telling them these old stories for?” she said, and for a moment, Nini thought her mother looked like a different person, bashful as a young girl.

“Because I want all my children to know what you and I have gone through together,” Nini’s father said. He lifted the cup and sniffed the liquor before turning to the girls. “In our village, if you go back there now, people will still tell you our love story. When we were fourteen your mother went to Inner Mongolia to visit her aunt. For the summer, your mother and I wrote to each other, and together we used more stamps than all the village would ever use in a year. The postman said he had never seen such a thing in his career.”

“Honestly, where did you find the money for the stamps?” Nini’s mother said. “I took money from my aunt’s drawer and never dared to ask her if she noticed the missing bills.”

“I stole copper wiring from the electric plant, remember, the one next to the Walnut Village. And I sold them.”

It must have been the first time Nini’s mother had heard the story, for her eyes turned as soft and dreamlike as Nini’s father’s. “I’m surprised they didn’t catch you,” she said. “And you didn’t get yourself electrocuted.”

“Had I been electrocuted, who would give you the sparks now?” Nini’s father replied with a chuckle.

Nini’s mother blushed. “Don’t tell these jokes in front of your children.”

He laughed and put a piece of pickled tofu into her mouth. The liquor made both of them daring, with happy oblivion. Nini watched them and then turned her eyes away, half-fascinated and half-disgusted.

“Your mother’s father—your grandfather—was a tofu maker, and my father was the best farmer in the area, and earned enough with his own labor to buy land.”

“And remember,” Nini’s mother said. “My father was an honest tofu maker, and never cheated a single soul in his life.”

“But this young girl, this Gu Shan, said your grandfathers were capitalists and landlords. She was a leader of the Red Guards, and she led a group of young girls to come and beat up your mother. Your mother was pregnant with Nini, and this young girl kicked your mother in the stomach. That’s why Nini was born this way.”

The ten-year-old and the eight-year-old stole quiet glances at Nini; Little Sixth babbled and grabbed Nini’s hand to chew on. Nini picked up Little Sixth and fed her a small bite of fried bread. “Is it why they have this denunciation ceremony for her today?” the eight-year-old asked after a long moment of silence.

“No,” Nini’s mother said. “Who would care about what she did to us? Nobody remembers our misfortune, because we are unimportant people. But that’s all right. Justice serves one way or another. One day you are the leader of the Red Guards, the next day you are a counterrevolutionary, waiting for a bullet. Whatever she is sentenced for, I’m just happy to see that she is paying off her debt today.”

Nini hugged the baby closer, and Little Sixth ran her hand along Nini’s cheek until the small fingers got ahold of Nini’s ear; she pulled at Nini’s ear, a gesture comforting to both of them.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nini’s mother said after a while, her voice calmer now. “I want to have a perm done tomorrow. Many of my colleagues have had it.”

“Will it be safe for the baby?” Nini’s father asked.

“I’ve checked, and they say it’s safe,” Nini’s mother said. “It’s time for me to look more like a woman than a ghost.”

“You’ve always been the most beautiful woman to me.”

“Who believes your drunken nonsense?” Nini’s mother smiled, and raised her cup to meet the cup of her husband.

BASHI WHISTLED and walked home in long and bouncy strides. Every ten or fifteen steps he saw people gather in front of an announcement, and more were walking along the road to join their work units, holding banners and slogans. His mind occupied with Nini, Bashi did not have time to stop and distract himself by talking with these people. He wondered why the idea had never occurred to him before. For several years, he had seen Nini in the street, hauling baskets of coal from the railway station in the early morning; during the day she went to the marketplace and gathered half-withered vegetable leaves the housewives peeled off before they paid. A despicable creature, he had thought of her then. She was still an ugly thing, but she definitely looked more like a girl now. Twelve years old, Bashi said to himself, savoring the pleasure of saying the sweet number out loud. With all the girls growing up healthily and beautifully in the world, who, besides him, would have thought of Nini as a desirable girl? He whistled, loudly and off-key, a love song from a romantic film in the fifties. Two girls in front of the gate of the middle school pointed at him and snickered, and he smiled back nicely, blowing a kiss to them as he had seen an actor do in a movie that, imported from some eastern European country, was the first foreign film ever shown in Muddy River. Bashi had been impressed with the man’s ease and had practiced the gesture many times in front of his grandmother’s dressing table. The girls walked faster, their faces flushed with indignity, and he laughed and blew another kiss, one of hundreds of kisses he’d blown, and would be blowing, that landed nowhere.

Bashi thought about Mrs. Hua, and then let his thoughts wander to the seven girls the old woman no longer had as daughters. They, although deserted by their parents, must have better faces and bodies than Nini. He wondered why it had never occurred to Nini’s parents to leave her on the riverbank to die when she had been born with that horrible face, or why her parents had kept Nini’s sisters as well, when obviously a son was what they were trying to get, baby after baby. He thought about the daughters that Mrs. Hua had left with other people as child brides. Perhaps that was what he needed, a young girl purchased from someone like the Huas as a future wife. But a thing like that would take some time. Meanwhile, he had Nini to think about, the ugly yet real girl Nini, who would be expecting him soon.

When Bashi got home he found a bamboo steamer on the table, kept warm by a small square of cotton blanket. Underneath, six white buns nestled together, fresh and inviting. He pinched one and was amused to see his fingers leave dents on the smooth crust. He called out to his grandmother that breakfast was ready; hearing no answer, he walked into the bedroom that he shared with her. Both beds had been made, and the curtain between the beds had been pulled back and tied with a ribbon. The curtain had been installed by Bashi two years earlier, when he had learned the exciting things he could do with himself in bed. Not that his grandmother would ever wake up to spy on him, her senses already dull as a rusty knife unearthed from an ancient tomb, but Bashi insisted on the necessity of a curtain, which added pleasure to his secret games.

Bashi took a bite of the bun and walked closer to his grandmother, who was dozing in a cushioned armchair on her side of the bedroom. He put a finger under her nostrils and felt her breath. She was alive. “Get up, get up, lazy piglet. The sun is shining and the house is on fire,” Bashi said, squeezing his voice into that of a woman—his grandmother’s voice when he had been a young boy—and singing, but she did not open her eyes. “Breakfast is ready, and the ants are waiting for your crumbs,” Bashi chanted again. She opened her eyes, nodded briefly, and went back to dozing. He gave up. She was eighty-one and she had the right to indulge herself in anything she liked: short naps in the mornings, a bite now and then, long moments spent sitting and snoozing on a chamber pot. It was no longer safe for her to go to the public outhouse, where people hopped in and out, through the stinky swamp, on boulders and rocks. Someday, Bashi knew, someday he would have to start to take care of her, cooking for her, making her bed, cleaning the chamber pot, cleaning her. He did not fear it. His grandmother had taken care of him all his life, and he would look after her when she needed him. If he was ever to have a baby girl, he would do the same thing for her. If he could find a baby girl now, Bashi thought, he would name the baby Bashiyi, Eighty-one, after his grandmother, the eighty-one-year-old baby. Bashi himself had been named the same way, as he had been born the year his great-grandfather had turned eighty. “Bashiyi,” Bashi said aloud to the room, and thought that only a genius could have come up with the name—it would make the baby girl his sister, as even a fool could see, but the girl would also belong to him. Eighty-one existed only because eighty did, and where would you find Bashiyi without Bashi? He felt the urge to share this thought with someone, but his grandmother was becoming more forgetful by the day; conversation between them was often interrupted by irrelevant comments about events that had happened years or even decades before. Perhaps he could tell Nini. Would she understand him? She looked like a stupid little thing, but people in town had agreed that he himself was dumb. “You never know,” Bashi said, and nodded in a knowing way, as if someone were standing right next to him. “She may be much smarter than you expected.”

Bashi squeezed the rest of the bun into his mouth, and left the house when the clock was striking eight. The main street was in a festive mood. Two men with red armbands were locking up the marketplace. Students from a nearby elementary school were marching and singing a Soviet song, the tune familiar to Bashi’s ears though he had never learned the lyrics, and he could not make out the words while listening to the children, shouting more than singing, their mouths a string of Os. In a side street, two day care teachers were hurrying twelve small children to join the parade, their hands holding a rope with its two ends in the teachers’ hands. The workers from the candy factory, men and women in blue overalls, chatting and laughing, were waiting for the students to pass and two men whistled at a few older girls from the elementary school who probably had been kept back many times and were old enough to be ogling back.

“Where’s the denunciation ceremony?” Bashi asked a policeman at a crossroad.

The policeman pulled Bashi back by his arm and said, “Don’t block the traffic.”

“What harm do I do standing here, comrade?” Bashi said. “Do you see that slogan on the wall? It says serve the people. Do you know who wrote that? Chairman Mao. Is that what you do to serve the people, huh, shout at them and almost break their wrists?”

The policeman turned to look at Bashi. “Who are you?”

“I’m a member of the people whom you serve.”

The policeman retrieved a small notebook from his pocket. “What’s your name? What’s your work unit?”

Bashi tried to make something up, but before he spoke, the policeman turned away to shout at someone who was trying to push through the children’s parade. Bashi shrugged and said under his breath, while he slipped away, “My name is Your Uncle and my work unit is your mother’s bed.”

A few steps later, Bashi asked someone else, and found out that people in this district were all marching toward a high school, one of six sites for the denunciation ceremony before the execution.

“Do you know who the woman is?” Bashi asked.

“A counterrevolutionary,” the man replied.

“I know, but who is she?”

The man shrugged. “What’s that got to do with you?”

“Where do you get the ticket?” Bashi asked.

“Ticket? Go with your school.”

“I’m out of school now.”

“Go with your work unit.”

Bashi thought of explaining that he was a free man, but he stopped midsentence when the man seemed not to be listening to him. Bashi stood and watched men and women, students, and retired workers march by. They all looked happy, singing songs, shouting slogans, and waving colorful banners to the sky. Bashi had never considered the importance of being a member of a unit. He thought of tagging along behind the high school students, but without a banner in his hand, he would look suspicious. After a while, he said to himself, “What’s so special about the denunciation ceremony? I’m going to the island to see the execution itself.”

Once the words were said, Bashi’s mind was made up. Why should he be one of the marching crowds when he had all the freedom in the world to do what he wanted? “Bye-bye,” he said, smiling, and waved at these people who pushed along in the street like a herd of sheep.

FOUR

The East Wind Stadium, built at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, in 1968, and modeled on the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, though with much less seating capacity, was not an unfamiliar stage for Kai. Several times a year she served as the master of ceremonies, celebrating May Day, the birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, National Day, and achievements of various kinds that the city government decided to honor in mass gatherings. From where she stood, she could not see most of her audience, and she had learned to gauge the attention of fifteen thousand people through her own amplified voice, which, it seemed, could be affected by even the smallest change in the air. Sometimes the echo of her voice came back with a life of its own, vibrant with energy, and Kai knew that she was being watched with admiration and perhaps benign desires, replacing a lover, a wife, or a child in a stranger’s heart, no matter how fleetingly. But these moments had occurred less and less in the past year; more often now she felt like a beggar, her voice lost in an intricate maze and bouncing off cold and uninterested walls.

“Are you nervous?” Han said when they stopped at the side gate. He looked around before touching her face with the back of his hand. Things would be all right, he said. She shook her head without replying. The previous fall, after she had returned to work from her maternity leave, she had lost control of herself onstage at the celebration for National Day. Her choked voice and uncontrollable tears had passed within a minute, and the audience, if baffled by her behavior, had not reacted in any way detrimental to the event. Still, the tears must have been noticed and talked about by the officials sitting closest to the stage as distinguished guests. It must be the hormones, the mayor’s wife commented to Kai at the banquet afterward, and Han’s mother, in a less generous and forgiving mood, warned Kai in front of the other guests not to let a woman’s petty sentiments get in the way of her political duties.

“People will always pay attention to a woman about to be executed,” Han said. Kai looked up at him, taken aback by the simple and cruel truth she had not known he was capable of speaking. Days after the crisis on National Day, Han had asked her what had happened; she had been worrying about the inattentiveness of the audience, Kai lied, knowing that she could never explain to Han or to anyone else the immense desolation that had engulfed her onstage.

Han assured her again that she would not lose her audience today, and Kai nodded and said she had to go into the stadium. He would see her at the banquet, he said, and she looked at the rehearsed curving of his mouth—like a teenager who was very aware of his handsome looks, Han practiced his facial expressions in front of the mirror, smiling, grinning, frowning, and staring—and felt a moment of tenderness. Had Han been born to parents of less status, perhaps the boyish innocence would have made him, in addition to being a good husband and a good father, a good person, but then that innocence might have long ago been crushed by the harshness of life. For the first time that morning, she looked into his eyes and wished him good luck for the day.

“Luck’s always on my side,” Han replied.

Kai left him for the side gate of the stadium. He would be watching her until she disappeared from his sight, and she had to restrain herself from turning to see him and asking his forgiveness. She had, earlier that morning, kissed Ming-Ming with a burst of passion that had surprised the nanny. The girl had retreated to a less noticeable corner of the nursery and waited, with lowered eyes and a stoic face, to take over the position of mothering the baby. Ming-Ming probed Kai’s face with his plump and soft fingers, unconscious of his mother’s love or of her resolution to depart from the world fenced in by that love.

Backstage, people were busy with last-minute preparations. A colleague went over the procedure with Kai, and then invited her to rest in a small room where a mug of fragrant tea was waiting for her. A moment later a secretary of the propaganda department came in and said someone was looking for her at the side gate. Was it Han, Kai asked, and the other woman said that it was not Kai’s husband but a stranger. A secret admirer, the secretary said with a grin, and Kai dismissed the joke, saying that she had no need for an admirer in her life now. The secretary said she would go and tell the man that Kai was already a happy wife and mother if that’s what Kai preferred. Kai thanked her and said no, she would go tell him herself. The secretary was called then to some small task, her laughter trailing her in the hallway. The world could be as trusting and oblivious as an unsuspicious husband.

Across the street from the stadium, Jialin stood under a tree, his gray jacket blending in with the wall behind him. An old Soviet-style cotton cap sat low on his eyebrows, the earflaps let down and tied under his chin; a white cotton mask, the kind worn by men and women alike in Muddy River in the long season of winter, covered most of his face. If not for his glasses, the frames broken and then fixed by layers of surgical tape, Jialin could be as inconspicuous as a worker coming home from a night shift or a shop owner on his way to his cagelike store. Still, it was unlike him to ask to see her in public on this day.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Kai said. In the world outside the library where they occasionally met, he and she could only act as strangers.

He had come to make sure everything would be all right, he said, and then, caught in a bout of coughing, he turned his face away. She did not know what he meant, Kai replied when his coughing passed, and she wondered if he could catch the falseness in her voice.

“I was wrong to worry, then?” Jialin said. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t have some secret plan to carry out all by yourself.”

“Why?”

“Any premature action equals suicide.”

“I meant why did you think I’d do something without telling you.”

Jialin studied Kai and she did not shy away from his gaze. Behind her she heard a whistle, the security guards shouting at some passerby. Soon she would have to finish this conversation with him; soon she would be expected onstage, and he, already deemed more than half-deceased by the world, would not be in the audience.

“You said something the last time I saw you,” Jialin said, and then shook his head. “I hope I was wrong.”

A revolution required some impulse, was what she had said two weeks ago, when she had been informed of the date set for Gu Shan’s execution. She had come to his shack, an unplanned visit. It’s time for them to act, she said, her hope to save Gu Shan’s life transforming her into a more passionate speaker than she had been after leaving the theater troupe. The masses had to be motivated, public attention had to be drawn to the case; with the right action they should be able at least to impede the execution, if not reverse the sentence. The whole time she was talking, Jialin listened with a frown. It was an impulsive and unwise proposal, Jialin said afterward, and for the first time they argued.

“I want to act as much as you do,” Jialin said now.

Kai looked at his eyes behind the glasses. They seemed perplexed, as if he could not find the right words. Outraged by his reasoning, which she had not been able to argue against, she had called him a coward that afternoon two weeks ago. He was closer to his grave than most people he had known in this world, Jialin replied then, and it was not his life or his death he was concerned about but choosing the right time. The statement was delivered with a cold anger that she had not known existed behind his calm gentleness, and Kai had to leave his shack without an apology. He had informed her of his condition when they had first met, six months earlier, but afterward the tuberculosis had never been brought up. Jialin was four years older than Kai, but his ailment made him ageless, a fact that Kai was aware of when she decided to befriend him; it must have occurred to him too, she imagined—that as a dying man he was exempted from many social rules—when he first wrote her a letter that, with its talk about democracy and dictatorship, could have led him to prison. She was baffled by his faith in a stranger, a woman whose voice represented, more than anything, the government in Muddy River, though she never asked him why he had chosen to entrust not only his idealism but also his life to her in the first place. Despite their fast friendship they had few opportunities to talk in person. In their letters to each other, they focused only on political topics and social changes, sharing little about their lives.

“Why did you think I would act on my own?” Kai asked again.

He hoped he was wrong, Jialin said, but it was a feeling that he might regret later had he not come to talk to her this morning. His intuition was not wrong, Kai thought of telling him: She had decided, since they had parted the last time, to carry out her own plan; reserved as he was, she had hoped that once she initiated a public outcry at the denunciation ceremony, he and his friends would have to choose action. Like a child forced to banish his mother from his world before she turned her back on him, Kai thought that she had prepared herself for a day, a battle, a life without Jialin. That he would sense her decision and come to stop her both moved and frightened her.

Jialin studied her. “Have you already started something I don’t know?”

“No.”

“And are you thinking about starting a protest without telling me?” he said. “Am I right to worry?”

A few people walked past them in the street, and both Jialin and Kai remained silent for a moment. A bicycle bell clanked impatiently, followed by a crashing noise. Neither looked away to search for the accident.

She had seen his face only once, when she searched for his address on his letter one early afternoon. The letter, delivered to the mailbox that bore her name outside the propaganda department, had caught her eye among the fan letters expressing admiration for her performance at various events or commentaries, which the letter writers hoped would be chosen and read aloud by her in the program: The handwriting on the envelope reminded her of an older man of her father’s generation who had devoted himself to the lifelong practice of calligraphy, and out of curiosity she singled it out before passing the others to a secretary in the propaganda department.

He answered her knock on the gate with a familiar greeting that afternoon six months earlier, and later she would guess rightly that she was not his only visitor. She pushed the gate open and let herself into a small yard, and after a while, he came out of a low shack and was surprised that she was not whom he was expecting. He was a tall man, much younger than she had pictured, his face pale and thin. As he spoke he broke from time to time into a bout of coughing, and his face would take on an unhealthy red color. He did not invite her into his shack that first time. Please come with masks and gloves next time, he said to her; when they knew each other better he suggested that they meet in the reading room of the only public library in town.

“I know I can’t keep you here for long,” said Jialin now, when no one was within earshot. “But can you at least promise me not to do anything before we talk again?”

The pleading tone was unfamiliar to Kai; between the two of them he had always been the confident one. Sometimes Kai had to rewrite a letter many times for fear that she would let him down.

“Sooner or later we have to give up what we have for what we believe, no?” Kai asked.

“We don’t sacrifice ourselves for any irrational dream.”

“So we’ll let Gu Shan sacrifice for us?” Kai said. She wondered if Jialin would find her passion unwise and childish, as he had indicated two weeks earlier. But it was not a disagreement with his principle but more of a sense of failing that made her question him. They had done nothing to save Gu Shan’s life, she said now; would they also just let her die without waking the public up to the injustice? He was not wrong that she was planning to act on her own, she said; she had her microphone and she had her voice.

Someone called her name, and Kai turned around and saw the secretary waving at her and then pointing out Kai and Jialin to the security guards. She had to go, Kai said. Could she at least think over his words before doing anything, Jialin asked, but Kai, having little time to answer, left him without the promise he was hoping for. The guards looked at her with concern when she crossed the street. One of those people who was determined to discuss political issues with her, Kai said when the secretary asked her, and no, they might as well leave him alone, she said to the guards.

SOMEDAY, SHE WOULD LOSE her oldest son, Jialin’s mother thought when she left his breakfast on the tree stump that served as a table. Apart from the tree stump, a chair, and a narrow cot, there was no other furniture in the shack. A heater made out of a gas can, which Jialin’s mother filled three times a day with hot water, kept the shack slightly warmer than outside, and dampness clung to the sheet and quilt all year round. On one side of the shack there were piles of books placed on flattened cardboard boxes, a plastic sheet underneath. A shoe box of wires, tubes, and knobs—his radio, as Jialin had called the crudely assembled thing—sat on his cot, and a pair of headphones, a skeleton of wires and metal rings, sat alongside.

Jialin was not in the shack, and she wondered where he could be on this morning. He did not leave home often, and she was almost happy that she had a moment alone in his shack. When he was around he was polite; he thanked her for the food and hot water and clean laundry she brought over but he did not invite her to sit down. That Jialin was someone she would never understand was a fact she had long ago accepted, but like all mothers whose children are growing up and drifting away from them, she felt an urge to stay in his shack as long as she could, to cling to anything that she could use, when he vanished from her life, to reconstruct a son from memory. She picked up a book and flipped to a random page; someone had underlined the paragraph with thick red and blue marks—Jialin perhaps, or the previous owner of the book, but she would prefer to think that the book had no history but belonged entirely to her son. She looked at the words that she could not read—she was illiterate, and it was for that reason, Jialin believed, that she had been assigned as an undertaker of banned books in the factory that produced paper products. He had begged her to save some of the books for him; he had by then been ill with tuberculosis for a year, and a son isolated from the world was enough to turn a mother into a petty thief. Every day she took a book or two from the piles to be pulped and hid them under her clothes. The books came home with her body temperature. His face brightened when he saw the books, and for that rare happiness she, an honest woman who had not cheated a soul in the world, never regretted her crime.

Someone called out from the house to complain about the late breakfast, and she hurried back to the kitchen to get the meal ready for the rest of the family: her three younger sons, aged nineteen, sixteen, and fourteen, who would do no more than pick up the chopsticks laid out for them next to their hands, and her husband, who praised the boys for behaving like men.

Jialin was a son from a previous marriage that had ended with a drowning accident; her first husband, a strong man who had grown up near the sea, had dived into the Muddy River and broken his neck, three months before Jialin’s birth. A son who came to claim his own father’s life, people said when they came to her with marriage offers and advice to give up the baby for adoption. She did not want to hear this nonsense, and waited for ten years before remarrying, but sometimes she wondered if she had made a mistake. Had Jialin been taken in by another couple, perhaps he would have had a different life, free of illness and unhappiness, neither of which she understood. Jialin was thirty-two, old for a marriage, too young for death. She would never see him get married to a woman but she would live to see him die. She took a deep breath but tears no longer came to her eyes. She did not know where he had contracted tuberculosis, just as she did not know where his bookishness came from; his own father, like her present husband, was a man without much education. Her three other sons were all robust, rude, boisterous—each a younger version of their father, who worked as a laborer at the loading station. Jialin was different, as if he had come from a different breed, not the son of her first husband but of a kind, graceful man of knowledge. Such a thought sometimes occurred to her, too strange to articulate even to herself.

Jialin’s mother had once dreamed about another man, when she had been a new wife and attended a class for illiterate women set up by Teacher Gu. She had been married less than a year. Already her husband had caused her all the pain a man could inflict on a wife. Teacher Gu was the gentlest man she had ever met, his eyes sad behind black-rimmed glasses, his shirt and trousers impeccably clean. She noticed his fingernails, kept neatly short, when he showed her the right way to grip the pencil, and the image made her blush afterward when she lay awake next to her snoring husband. She was disappointed when she heard that Teacher Gu was going to marry one of her classmates, a landlord’s concubine, a used woman with a small heart-shaped face, and it was the indignity she felt, as much as her pregnancy, that stopped her from attending the classes. Over the years she caught sight of Teacher Gu in town, quiet and melancholy, as she remembered him. He did not recognize her, but the fact that she could see him from afar was strangely comforting. She imagined how the old man would feel, losing a daughter at gunpoint; even Teacher Gu’s wife, once the object of her secret envy, was forgiven now because, after all, a son was what Teacher Gu needed but she had given him just a counterrevolutionary daughter. If only he had a son like Jialin, who, with his pale complexion and the unhealthy blush on his cheeks, was as sad a man as she remembered Teacher Gu to be. They would understand each other, she thought for a long moment, and shook her head. She carried the food to the dining table and sat down next to her husband. Jialin would die a young man; what kind of solace would he be as a son to Teacher Gu? They had kept him in the sanitarium for some time but he had shown little hope of recovering. There was no point in wasting money on him, when the three younger boys seemed to be outgrowing their clothes overnight; she didn’t need her husband to remind her of this, before she agreed to take Jialin home. Her husband had built a shack in the yard for Jialin, and it was expected, though not said, that Jialin would spend the rest of his days there.

TEACHER GU LEFT HOME after breakfast, avoiding the eyes of the neighbors who were walking or riding bicycles to their work units. A few students from his school shouted out greetings to him. He nodded, unable to tell if there was a difference in their attitudes toward him. Would their parents tell them about his daughter? He wondered what the children would think of him when he returned to his lectern the next day, teaching the same lessons from which his own daughter had gone astray.

It was a half-hour walk from his house to the west end of town. When he turned into the main street, Teacher Gu was aware that his hands, thrust into his coat pockets, held no banners, and his tired legs could not keep up with the others. He decided to take smaller side streets and alleys, where, after the departure of people for the denunciation ceremony, came the chickens, cats, and dogs, as well as old widows and widowers, to claim the space between the rows of houses. An elderly man, sitting on a low stool, looked up at Teacher Gu and mumbled something through his toothless mouth; Teacher Gu nodded, not grasping what he had been told, and a woman, younger than the man but old nonetheless, stooped close and wiped the drool off the old man’s chin with a handkerchief pinned on his coat, before she walked across to where she had been sitting, balancing on a chair with a broken leg and knitting something with used, rust-colored yarn.

When Teacher Gu walked past the passenger station, the train running to the provincial capital was making its brief stop. The guardian, who had been sitting in the booth during the day and sleeping in an adjacent cabin as long as Teacher Gu could remember, was yawning by the track. A girl of seven or eight was selling hard-boiled eggs through the windows to the passengers, her fingers frostbitten and as swollen as baby carrots. Teacher Gu slowed down and looked at her. Out of habit, he thought of finding out where she lived, and if she ever went to school, but he dismissed the idea. For thirty years, he had helped children from poor families, mostly girls, to go to school, paying their tuition and fees when their parents could not spare the money. He saw the joy of being able to read, in his wife’s eyes, as well as in the eyes of each new generation of girls; he hoped that he had done his share, even if it was only a little, to make this place a better one. But now he saw that the messages from those books, coming from men and women full of the desire to deceive and to seduce, would only lead these girls astray. Even his two best students—his wife and his daughter—had failed him. Shan would never have become a frantic Red Guard if she hadn’t been able to read the enticements of the Cultural Revolution in newspapers; nor would she have become a prisoner, by spelling out her doubts, had he never taught her to think for herself, rather than to follow the reasoning of the invisible masses. His wife would have simply endured the loss of Shan in painful silence, as all illiterate women endured the loss of their children, surrendering them to an indisputable fate and putting their only hope in the next life.

The old guardian rang a bell. Teacher Gu stopped and watched the white steam in the cold morning air, and the passengers who were being taken away from him, a man stuffing an egg into his mouth, a woman nibbling on a homemade sausage. Soon the train sped up, and he could no longer identify faces. This was where he and his wife were in their life, where one day could be indistinguishable from the next, and they shouldn’t be worrying about a moment or a day being too long or too miserable. At least that’s what he had told his wife when she returned from burning the clothes; they were to look forward and understand that the pains would not be as acute a year or two from now. “Everybody dies,” he had said. “We’re not the first parents, and won’t be the last, to lose a daughter.” It was not the first time they had lost a child either; he had not said it but hoped his wife would remember that.

The train passed, and a conductor standing at the rear of the train waved at Teacher Gu. After a few seconds, Teacher Gu gathered some energy to wave back, but the man was a small dot already, too far away to see his gesture.

Teacher Gu walked across the track. Where the street became an unpaved dirt road that pointed to the rural areas in the mountains, Teacher Gu found the Huas’ cabin. Old Hua was squatting in front of the cabin and sorting glass bottles. Mrs. Hua was stirring a pot of porridge on the open fire of a small gas stove. Teacher Gu watched them, and only when Mrs. Hua looked up did he greet them.

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