A Hundred Flowers (15 page)

“Is that what you believe?”

Tao shook his head.

“That’s good, because your
ba ba
did nothing wrong,” Wei explained. “The authorities accused him of writing a letter criticizing the Party, when in fact, he never wrote such a letter.”

Wei glanced up at Kai Ying, who had reached over for his empty teacup, listening.

“How do you know?” Tao asked.

Wei had never lied to his grandson before. He might have embellished a story here and there, but the only secrets he kept were the ones the boy was too young to know. Wei had never outright lied to him and he knew he couldn’t now. He glanced out to the courtyard and at the kapok tree. When he turned back to Tao, he saw Sheng again at the same age, always so formal and closemouthed around him. He remembered all the times he heard Sheng talking to Liang, joking and laughing, but as soon as he entered the room, it was as if the air had changed. He and Sheng hadn’t learned to be friends until late in his life. Now he only wanted his son home again.

“I know…” Wei began, realizing the words that followed would change all of their lives forever. “I know because it was
me.
I was the one to write the letter, not your
ba ba.
”

Wei felt as if he’d been falling for the past year and had finally hit the ground. He stared down at the table and couldn’t look at either Kai Ying or Tao. He suddenly felt exhausted and wanted only to lie down and close his eyes. The kitchen was suddenly quiet, as if everything had stopped. For a moment, he wasn’t even sure if he’d really said the words aloud.

“It was
you
?” Kai Ying finally said. Her words reverberated against the walls and returned to him. He felt her standing just behind him.

He looked at Tao. “Your
ba ba
had nothing to do with it,” he said again. “He’s a good and courageous son who assumed my blame. His only fault is having a coward as a father.”

“I don’t understand. Why? Why would
you
have written the Premier a letter?” Kai Ying asked, her voice rising with each word. “You never paid any attention to politics before. How many times did you tell Sheng to mind his own business and to stay out of trouble?”

Wei shook his head as if that were an answer. He stood up and turned to face Kai Ying, who stood stone-still holding his teacup.

“Kai Ying, I’m so sorry,” he said, trying to explain what couldn’t be explained. “I don’t know what possessed me to write the letter. I don’t know why. Sheng seemed so certain that the Party wouldn’t do anything this time, and I thought…”

“You thought?” Kai Ying interrupted. “You thought?” Her eyes narrowed as her voice rose with fury, edged with a hard, cold precision. “You thought you wouldn’t be touched because you’re the great Professor Lee from Lingnan University. You thought you were smarter and better than everyone else. That’s what you thought!” Kai Ying shouted. She stepped back and hurled the teacup, shattering it against the wall, startling them all.

Kai Ying’s angry words hung heavily in the thick air. She had always been the peacemaker in the family. Wei pulled at his tunic collar and felt the room spinning, but he didn’t look away from Kai Ying, a small vein pulsing angrily on the side of her forehead, her entire body trembling. Her dark eyes were unrecognizable, filled with something worse than anger: disappointment. Every little sound suddenly seemed magnified, the soft bubbling of the soup boiling, the clock ticking, the pumping of his thin, warm blood from his heart to his brain. And for just a moment, Wei wondered if it were possible to drown from the inside out.

Outside came the singsong voice of the fruit peddler calling out
“Bananas! Oranges! Mangoes!”
Every morning he went up and down the street, carrying two heavy baskets of fruit balanced on a wooden pole across his back and shoulders. Wei thought he had the best lichee and mangoes of anyone at the marketplace. He wanted to run out and buy all the fruit in the peddler’s baskets as an offering, although he knew even the sweetest fruits in all of Guangzhou couldn’t buy him forgiveness.

When the baby’s cries suddenly drifted down from upstairs, Kai Ying looked away, and just as quickly she rushed out of the kitchen.

Tao had stayed seated at the table. His grandson was no longer crying, but watching him with the distant gaze of a stranger. Wei hoped the boy would understand that he never meant for any of this to happen. But before he could say anything, Tao scraped back his chair and stood up.

“Tao, I’m sorry,” Wei said.

“You made
ba ba
go away.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I hate you,” Tao said, “I hate you.”

After

October 1958

Kai Ying

It took all Kai Ying’s strength to pretend nothing had changed, when in fact, their entire world had. Even the air she breathed seemed tinged with bitterness. There
was
a letter and Wei had written it. Kai Ying’s thoughts simmered as she put on the rice and washed the mustard greens Auntie Song had brought over. She sliced a small piece of pork and the lotus roots and scallions and then minced the garlic. She lit the fire and poured peanut oil into the wok and waited for it to get hot. Her hands moved without any thought as to what they were doing. They had to eat, didn’t they? They had to find a way to live with this truth, didn’t they?

Kai Ying saw it all so clearly now, the guilt that had to be consuming Wei each day as he retreated more and more into himself. As difficult as it was, Kai Ying understood why Sheng had taken her father-in-law’s place when the police came; Wei would have never been able to survive outside of the villa, much less at a reeducation facility. But why hadn’t Wei told her the truth? Why did he allow her to suffer for over a year, not knowing if there really was a letter, letting her believe that Sheng was the one to jeopardize everything they had? And how was she ever going to forgive a man who would let his pride betray his family?

Kai Ying quickly threw the garlic and scallions into the wok, followed by the pork and lotus roots and black bean paste, frying everything quickly together, her long wooden chopsticks stirring it all evenly as the hot oil splattered and the warm, inviting fragrance filled the kitchen, masking the acrimony which lay just underneath. It was one of Sheng’s favorite dishes and the thought brought another kind of sorrow.

Tao

Tao hardly spoke to his grandfather. His one-word answers came only after his mother had gotten angry at him for not responding to his grandfather at dinner. “Tao, your
ye ye
is speaking to you,” she said, her voice laced with a sharpness he rarely heard directed at him.

In his room that night, she was still distant and stern when she told him she never wanted to see him disrespect his grandfather, or any other adult, again. It wasn’t the kind of person she raised him to be. “Do you understand?” she asked. Tao chewed on the inside of his cheek and nodded. What he couldn’t understand was how she could speak to his grandfather after what he did, but Tao knew better than to ask. “That’s not an answer,” she said. “Yes,” he said, “I understand.” He chewed on his cheek again until he tasted blood.

Song

Song cut the stems of
yu choy
and
bak choy
and washed the dirt off in a wooden bucket by her side before shaking off the excess water and laying them in her basket. Harvesting her vegetables was usually a task that gave her great pleasure, but today she moved through the motions absentmindedly. She glanced up when she heard a noise come from the courtyard, the glare of the midday sun blinding her for a moment. In the bright light, she thought there was a shadow in the distance moving toward her. Song hoped it was Wei coming to see her, but when she raised her hand against the glare, there was no one there.

*   *   *

Just two days ago, Song listened in disbelief when Kai Ying, shaken and on the verge of tears, told her that it was
Lo Yeh
who had written the letter. “That’s impossible, Wei has no interest…” she said, only to suddenly remember the day last month when he’d visited her, realizing now what he must have been trying to tell her. What was Wei thinking to have written that letter? In all the years she’d known him, he had always refused to accompany Sheng to any kind of political gathering, calling it a waste of good time. His life began and ended with his family and his work at the university.

Since then, Song had been desperate to know how he was doing. She’d seen him only once in the courtyard and he appeared so old and frail that it frightened her. He’d lost so much weight his clothes hung loosely from his tall, thin frame. Why hadn’t she seen what had been right in front of her? He avoided her pleas to sit down and talk to her.

“What’s there to talk about?” he said. “What’s done now has to be undone.”

“You made a mistake.”

“I’ve been such a fool,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

“My father used to say that the only fool is the man who can’t admit he’s one,” Song said. “Can’t you see Sheng knew what he was doing? It was his choice.”

“And my weakness,” Wei said. “I stood by and allowed him to be taken away in my place.”

“He knew what he was doing,” she repeated.

“I should have never put him in that position!”

“You know nothing about your own son,” Song said, her voice rising. “And that should be your biggest regret. You’ve lived in the past for so long you can’t see what’s right in front of you. You made a mistake, an unintentional mistake. Who in this life hasn’t crossed that bridge?” she asked, her voice falling. “Sheng would have never allowed them to take you. He’s young and strong, he’ll survive.”

Wei looked away from her. Song wondered if he’d heard anything she’d said. When he turned back to her, she saw the same despair and sadness in his eyes as when Liang had died.

She hadn’t seen him since.

Suyin

Suyin lay in bed unable to sleep. After months of living on the streets in a constant state of exhaustion, she spent the first two weeks after giving birth oblivious to the world around her. It was as if she’d fallen into an endless dream, the bed a safe and warm place she never wanted to leave. Suyin could hardly keep her eyes open and awoke just long enough to sip some soup or nurse the baby. But it all felt distant and hazy, and before any other thought came to her mind, she’d fallen back into a deep sleep.

*   *   *

Now Suyin stared up at the high ceiling, wide-awake in the dark. Her baby was nearly a month old, and she was no longer in the grip of exhaustion and was thinking clearly again. After following Kai Ying home from the market, she began walking to the Dongshan district at least twice a week. Suyin liked the wide, clean streets lined with shady trees where she could move slowly and undisturbed, daydreaming of what it would be like to live in one of the grand old villas her mother had always talked about, safe from the outside world behind their tall walls. Suyin remembered it had been raining hard the morning she felt her first strong contraction, a searing pain that made her stop and double over.
Not yet, not yet, not yet,
she chanted. She took several deep breaths. When the pain finally subsided, she kept walking. She was only a few blocks away from where Kai Ying lived and Suyin willed herself to keep moving. When the second contraction came, she had just pushed open the courtyard gate.

*   *   *

Suyin wondered how much longer she’d be able to stay at the villa. Just last week she heard Kai Ying and the old professor downstairs in the kitchen quarreling, though she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. They’d hardly spoken since. Suyin couldn’t help but wonder if they’d been arguing about her. How could she blame them; she had wandered off the street and into their lives from nowhere.

Several nights since, Suyin had slipped downstairs to the kitchen, looking for any kind of food that she might store away, just enough, she thought to herself, so that her theft wouldn’t be noticed. She needed to be prepared if she was asked to leave; dried plums, green peanuts, biscuits, anything that might keep her going until she figured out what to do next. Suyin knew that the hunger would never go away, and it wasn’t just her now, she had the baby to worry about too.

She looked around the dark room at the shadowy pieces of furniture, the bassinet to one side of the bed, the baby asleep in it. It was still hard to believe that she’d given birth and the baby was alive and well in the room with her. The darkness no longer frightened her like it did when she was a child. The old ghosts she imagined lurking in the shadows were nothing compared to what she saw in the light of day. Suyin turned onto her side and felt a sudden pressing tension at the back of her neck as her thoughts returned to that afternoon.

*   *   *

Suyin’s stepfather never came home during the day. She remembered hearing the door opening, thinking her two brothers had returned early, only to see his oily smile appear instead. Why was he home? He usually didn’t return until dinner, or even later, most nights smelling of alcohol. Not until that afternoon did he ever really pay any attention to her. “You’re growing up,” he said. Suyin didn’t think anything about it and poured him a cup of tea, even though she could smell the rice wine on his breath. “Why aren’t you at work?” she dared to ask. “Because I’m done for the day,” he said. He looked at her strangely and she wished her brothers would return. When Suyin turned around, she could feel him standing behind her. When she told him she had to run an errand, he blocked the door and wouldn’t let her leave the apartment. He wouldn’t let her leave and she felt her heart race and her mouth go dry. She had schoolwork to finish and the boys would be back any minute, she said. He looked at her again and she felt something heavy in the middle of her stomach. And then the terrible stink of his breath was on her. “You’re all grown up now,” he said, his hand over her mouth, his body pressing against her even as she tried to push him away. “You’re such a pretty girl.” When he had finished, he left her there on the floor and wouldn’t even look at her. Suyin lay there paralyzed until she heard her brothers coming back and she prayed for the feeling to return to her limbs again.