A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (5 page)

At noon, the restaurant commissioned by the stockbrokerage delivers the lunch boxes to the VIP lounges, and the traders on the floor heat lunches in the microwave or make instant noodles. Mr. Su, who is always cheered up by the mixed smells of leftovers from other dinner tables, goes into a terminal booth in a hopeful mood. Someday, he thinks, when his wife is freed from taking care of Beibei, he’ll ask her to accompany him to the stockbrokerage. He wants her to see other people’s lives, full of meaningless but happy trivialities.

Mr. Su leaves the brokerage promptly at five o’clock. Outside the building, he sees Mr. Fong, sitting on the curb and looking up at him like a sad, deserted child.

“Mr. Fong,” Mr. Su says. “Are you all right? Why didn’t you come in and find me?”

Mr. Fong suggests they go for a drink, and then holds out a hand and lets Mr. Su pull him to his feet. They find a small roadside diner, and Mr. Fong orders a few cold plates and a bottle of strong yam wine. “Don’t you sometimes wish a marriage doesn’t go as long as our lives last?” Mr. Fong says over the drink.

“Is there anything wrong?” Mr. Su asks.

“Nothing’s right with the wife after she’s released,” Mr. Fong says.

“Are you going to divorce her?”

Mr. Fong downs a cup of wine. “I wish I could,” he says and starts to sob. “I wish I didn’t love her at all so I could just pack up and leave.”

BY LATE AFTERNOON Mrs. Su is convinced that Beibei is having problems. Her eyes, usually clear and empty, glisten with a strange light, as if she is conscious of her pain. Mrs. Su tries in vain to calm her down, and when all the other ways have failed, she takes out a bottle of sleeping pills. She puts two pills into a small porcelain mortar, and then, after a moment of hesitation, adds two more. Over the years she has fed the syrup with the pill powder to Beibei so that the family can have nights for undisturbed sleep.

Calmed by the syrup, Beibei stops screaming for a short moment, and then starts again. Mrs. Su strokes Beibei’s forehead and waits for the medicine to take over her limited consciousness. When the telephone rings, Mrs. Su does not move. Later, when it rings for the fifth time, she checks Beibei’s eyes, half closed in drowsiness, and then closes the bedroom door before picking up the receiver.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone? Are you tired of me, too?” Mrs. Fong says.

Mrs. Su tries to find excuses, but Mrs. Fong, uninterested in any of them, cuts her off. “I know who the woman is now.”

“How much did it cost you to find out?”

“Zero. Listen, the husband—shameless old man—he confessed himself.”

Mrs. Su feels relieved. “So the worst is over, Mrs. Fong.”

“Over? Not at all. Guess what he said to me this afternoon? He asked me if we could all three of us live together in peace. He said it as if he was thinking on my behalf. ‘We have plenty of rooms. It doesn’t hurt to give her a room and a bed. She is a good woman, she’ll take good care of us both.’ Taking care of his
thing,
for sure.”

Mrs. Su blushes. “Does she want to live with you?”

“Guess what? She’s been laid off. Ha ha, not a surprise, right? I’m sure she wants to move in. Free meals. Free bed. Free man. What comes better? Maybe she’s even set her eyes on our inheritance. Imagine what the husband suggested? He said I should think of her as a daughter. He said she lost her father at five and did not have a man good to her until she met him. So I said, Is she looking for a husband, or a stepfather? She’s
honey-mouthing
him, you see? But the blind man! He even begged me to feel for her pain. Why didn’t he ask her to feel for me?”

Something hits the door with a heavy thump, and then the door swings open. Mrs. Su turns and sees an old man leaning on the door, supported by her husband. “Mr. Fong’s drunk,” her husband whispers to her.

“Are you there?” Mrs. Fong says.

“Ah, yes, Mrs. Fong, something’s come up and I have to go.”

“Not yet. I haven’t finished the story.”

Mrs. Su watches the two men stumble into the bathroom. After a moment, she hears the sounds of vomiting and the running of tap water, her husband’s low comforting words, Mr. Fong’s weeping.

“So I said, Over my dead body, and he cried and begged and said all these ridiculous things about opening one’s mind. Many households have two women and one man living in peace now, he said. It’s the marriage revolution, he said. Revolution? I said. It’s retrogression. You think yourself a good Marxist, I said, but Marx didn’t teach you bigamy. Chairman Mao didn’t tell you to have a concubine.”

Mr. Su helps Mr. Fong lie down on the couch and he closes his eyes. Mrs. Su watches the old man’s tear-smeared face twitch in pain. Soon Mrs. Fong’s angry words blend with Mr. Fong’s snoring.

With Mr. Fong fast asleep, Mr. Su stands up and walks into Beibei’s room. One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs. Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs. Fong’s blabbering and walks to Beibei’s bedroom. There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white, with a bluish hue. Mrs. Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei’s hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, gray and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents’ garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy.

Immortality

HIS STORY, AS THE STORY OF EVERY ONE OF us, started long before we were born. For dynasties, our town provided the imperial families their most reliable servants. Eunuchs they are called, though out of reverence we call them Great Papas. None of us is a direct descendant of a Great Papa, but traveling upstream in the river of our blood, we find uncles, brothers, and cousins who gave up their maleness so that our names would not vanish in history. Generations of boys, at the age of seven or eight, were chosen and castrated
—cleaned
as it was called—and sent into the palace as apprentices, learning to perform domestic tasks for the emperor and his family. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, they started to earn their allowances, silver coins that they saved and sent home to their parents. The coins were kept in a trunk, along with a small silk sack in which the severed male root was preserved with herbs. When the brothers of Great Papas reached the marriage age, their parents unlocked the trunk and brought out the silver coins. The money allowed the brothers to marry their wives; the wives gave birth to their sons; the sons grew up to carry on the family name, either by giving birth to more sons or by going into the palace as cleaned boys. Years went by. When Great Papas could no longer serve the imperial masters on their wobbly knees, they were released from the palace and taken in by their nephews. Nothing left for them to worry about, they sat all day in the sun and stroked the cats they had brought home from the palace, fat and slow as they themselves were, and watched the male dogs chasing the females in the alleys. In time death came for them. Their funerals were the most spectacular events in our town: sixty-four Buddhist monks, in gold and red robes, chanted prayers for forty-nine days to lead their souls into the heaven; sixty-four Tao masters, in blue and gray robes, danced for forty-nine days to drive away any evils that dared to attach to their bodies. The divine moment came at the end of the forty-nine days, when the silk sacks containing their withered male roots were placed in the coffins. Now that the missing part had rejoined the body, the soul could leave without regret, to a place better than our town.

This was the story of every one of our Great Papas. For dynasties they were the most trustworthy members of the imperial family. They tended to the princesses’ and the concubines’ most personal tasks without tainting the noble blood with the low and dirty desires of men; they served the emperor and the princes with delicacy, yet, unlike those young handmaids who dreamed of seducing the emperor and his sons with their cheap beauties, Great Papas posed no threat to the imperial wives. There were wild rumors, though, about them serving as playthings for the princes before they reached the legal age to take concubines, and unfortunate tales of Great Papas being drowned, burned, bludgeoned, beheaded for the smallest mistakes, but such stories, as we all know, were made up to attack the good name of our town. What we believe is what we have seen— the exquisitely carved tombstones in our cemetery, the elegantly embroidered portraits in our family books. Great Papas filled our hearts with pride and gratitude. If not for them, who were we, the small people born into this no-name town?

The glory of our town has faded in the past century. But may I tell you one boy’s story before I reach the falling of Great Papas in history? As a tradition, the boys sent to the palace were not to be the only sons, who held the even more sacred duty of siring more boys. But the greatest among our Great Papas was an only son of his family. His father, also an only son, died young before he had the chance to plant more seeds in his wife’s belly. With no uncle or brother to send them money from the palace, the boy and his widowed mother lived in poverty. At ten years old, after a fight with the neighbors’ boys who had bragged about their brothers accepting gold bricks from the emperor’s hands, the boy went into the cowshed and cleaned himself, with a rope and a sickle. According to the legend, the boy walked across the town, his male root dripping blood in his hand, and shouted to the people watching on with pity in their eyes, “Wait till I become the best servant of His Majesty!” Unable to endure the shame and the despair of living under a sonless and grandsonless roof, his mother threw herself into a well. Twenty years later, the son became the master eunuch in the palace, taking under his charge twenty-eight hundred eunuchs and thirty-two hundred handmaids. With no brothers to send his money to, he saved every coin and retired as the richest man in the region. He hired men to dig out his poor mother’s coffin and gave her a second funeral, the most extravagant one ever to take place in our town. It was in the ninth month of 1904, and to this day our old people haven’t stopped talking about every detail of the funeral: the huge coffin carved out of a sandalwood tree, stacks of gold bricks, trunks of silk clothes, and cases of jade bowls for her to use in the next life. Even more impressive were the four young girls the son had purchased from the poor peasants on the mountain, all of them twelve years old. They were put into satin dresses they would have never dreamed of wearing and were each fed a cup of mercury. The mercury killed them instantly, so their peachy complexions were preserved when they were paraded in sedan chairs before the coffin. With burning incense planted in their curled fingers, the four girls accompanied the mother to the other world as her loyal handmaids.

This Great Papa’s story was the brightest page in our history, like that one most splendid firework streaking the sky before darkness floods in. Soon the last dynasty was overthrown by republics. The emperor was driven out of the Forbidden City; so were his most loyal servants, the last generation of our Great Papas. By the 1930s most of them lived in poverty in the temples around the Forbidden City. Only the smartest ones earned a fair living by showing their bodies to Western reporters and tourists, charging extra for answering questions, even more for having their pictures taken.

THEN WE HAVE a short decade of republic, the warlords, two world wars, in both of which we fought on the winning side yet winning nothing, the civil war, and finally we see the dawn of communism. The day the dictator claims the communist victory in our country, a young carpenter in our town comes home to his newly wedded wife.

“It says we are going to have a new life from now on,” the young wife tells the husband, pointing to a loudspeaker on their roof.

“New or old, life is the same,” the husband replies. He gets his wife into bed and makes love to her, his eyes half closed in ecstasy while the loudspeaker is broadcasting a new song, with men and women repeating the same lyrics over and over.

This is how the son is conceived, in a chorus of
Communism is so great, so great, and so great.
The same song is broadcast day after day, and the young mother hums along, touching her growing belly, and cutting carefully the dictator’s pictures from newspapers. Of course we never call him the dictator. We call him Our Father, Our Savior, the North Star of Our Lives, the Never Falling Sun of Our Era. Like most women of her generation, the mother is illiterate. Yet unlike others, she likes to look at newspapers, and she saves the pictures of the dictator in a thick notebook. Isn’t she the woman with the greatest wisdom in our town? No other woman would ever think of watching the dictator’s face while pregnant with a son. Of course there has always been the saying that the more a pregnant woman studies a face, the greater the possibility of the baby owning that face. Years ago, young mothers in the cities liked to watch one kind of imported doll, all of them having a foreign name, Shirley Temple. Decades later, movie stars will be the most studied faces among the pregnant mothers. But at this time the dictator is the only superstar in the media, so the mother has been gazing at the dictator’s face for ten months before the baby’s birth.

The son is born with the dictator’s face, a miracle unnoticed by us at first. For the next ten years we will avoid looking at him, for fear we will see his dead father in his face. The father was a hardworking man, nice to his neighbors, good to his wife. We would have never imagined that he would be an enemy of our newborn communist nation. Yet there are witnesses, not one, but a whole pub of evening drinkers.

What gets him killed is his comment about heroes and sows. At this time, we respect the communist power above us as our big brother. In our big-brother country, the Soviet Union, it is said, women are encouraged to produce babies for the communist cause, and those who have given birth to a certain number of babies are granted the title
mother hero.
Now that we are on the same highway to the same heaven, the dictator decides to adopt the same policy.

The young carpenter is a little drunk when he jokes aloud to his fellow drinkers, “Mother heroes? My sow has given birth to ten babies in a litter. Shouldn’t she be granted a title too?”

That’s it, a malicious attack on the dictator’s population policy. The carpenter is executed after a public trial. All but his wife attend the meeting, every one of us sticking our fists high and hailing the People’s victory, our unanimous voice drowning out his wife’s moan from her bed. We shout slogans when the bullet hits the young man’s head. We chant revolutionary songs when his body is paraded in the street. When we finally lose our voices from exhaustion, we hear the boy’s first cry, loud and painful, and for a moment, it is difficult for us to look into one another’s eyes. What have we done to a mother and a baby? Wasn’t the dead young man one of our brothers?

What we do not know, at the time, is that a scholar in the capital has been thrown in jail and tortured to death for predicting a population explosion and calling for the dictator to change the policy. Nor do we know that in a meeting with the leader of the big-brother country in Moscow, the dictator has said that we do not fear another world war or nuclear weapons:
Let the Americans drop the atomic bombs on our
heads. We have five hundred million people in our nation.
Even if half of us are killed, we still have two hundred and
fifty million, and these two hundred and fifty million would
produce another two hundred and fifty million in no time.

Later, when we read his words in the newspaper, our blood boils. For the years to come, we will live with our eyes turned to the sky, waiting for the American bombs to rain down on us, waiting to prove to the dictator our courage, and our loyalty.

THE BOY GROWS up fast like a bamboo shoot. The mother grows old even faster. After the carpenter’s death, upon her request, the Revolution Committee in our town gives her a job as our street sweeper. Every dawn, we lie in our beds and listen to the rustling of her bamboo broom. She has become a widow at the age of eighteen, as beautiful as a young widow could be, and naturally some of our bachelors cannot help but fantasize about her in their single beds. Yet none of our young men offers her another marriage. Who wants to marry a counterrevolutionary’s widow and spend the rest of his life worrying about being a sympathizer of the wrong person? What’s more, even though the dictator has said that men and women are equal in our nation, we still believe a widow who wants another husband is a whore inside. Our belief is confirmed when we read in newspapers the dictator’s comment about one of his close followers who has become an enemy of the nation:
A man cannot conceal his
reactionary nature forever, just as a widow cannot hide her desire to be fucked.

So the young mother withers in our eyes. Her face becomes paler each day, and her eyes drier. By the time the boy is ten, the mother looks like a woman of sixty. None of our bachelors bothers to lay his eyes on her face anymore.

The boy turns ten the year the famine starts. Before the famine, for three years, we have been doing nothing except singing for our communist heaven and vowing to liberate the suffering working class around the world. Farmers and workers have stopped toiling, their days spent in the pains and joys of composing yet another poem, competing to be the most productive proletarian poet. We go to the town center every day to discuss the strategy of how to conquer the world under the leadership of the dictator. When the famine catches us unprepared, we listen to the dictator’s encouraging words in the loudspeakers. He calls for us to make our belts one notch tighter for our communist future, and we happily punch more holes in them. The second year of the famine, the dictator says in the loudspeakers:
Get rid
of the sparrows and the rats; they are the thieves who stole our
food and brought hunger to us.

Killing sparrows is the most festive event in the three long years of famine. After months of drinking thin porridges and eating weed roots, on the morning of the sparrow-killing day we each get two steamed buns from the municipal dining room. After breakfast we climb to the roof of every house, and start to strike gongs and drums at the Revolution Committee’s signal. From roof to roof, our arrhythmic playing drives the sparrows into the sky. All morning and all afternoon we play, in different shifts, and whenever a sparrow tries to rest in a treetop we shoo him away with colorful flags bound to long bamboo poles. In the evening the sparrows start to rain down on us like little bombs, dying in horror and exhaustion. Kids decorated as little scarecrows run around, collecting the dead sparrows for our dinner.