The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (9 page)

Jen-sheng points sternly to the ground. “
K’ou-t’ou
before your elder,” he commands again.

Tse-tung purses his small mouth and straightens his long back. When he stands at full height, he’s a good head taller than his father. How the young Tse-tung inherited such height, no one knows for certain. Maybe it comes from his mother’s grandfather, rumoured to have towered over his kin. With his high and broad forehead and his mother’s sweet and taunting eyes, two rainbow-arched lids with flat walls underneath, Tse-tung looks as sturdy as the wall behind him. He’s intimidating in size and in his precocious daring. Four tutors the boy’s been through since the end of his public schooling, but not one could temper him. Not that he hasn’t learned his texts. Jen-sheng is well aware that his eldest son’s command of the classics is better than his own, for on every occasion when he corners Tse-tung with some saying from Confucius or Mencius, the child turns the Master back against him.

Jen-sheng wants to keep fighting, but Tse-tung can’t be out-reasoned, can’t be physically beaten, can’t be married off like a normal son or made to work the fields or the abacus or anything. It’s an intolerable bind: Jen-sheng loses
in every way, either by fighting or by capitulating to his son’s insubordinate behaviour, especially here and now, in front of Tse-min and Wen Ch’i-mei and the child, and with Madam Mao and her loose tongue loitering out in the courtyard, and Wu and those damn sedan transporters pricking their ears. Heaven knows what they’ll say about Mao Jen-sheng back in their tea houses. He’ll be mocked. That woman Luo is stuck in his sedan, affronted by her impudent groom. If Jen-sheng dares to send the bride back to Luo, the powerful father will call him a fool, an ignorant old fool, incapable of controlling his own boy.

“
K’ou-t’ou
this instant,” he shrieks, one last time.

Jen-sheng’s voice cracks. He smoothes the ends of his moustache and tries to appear magisterial. Tse-tung smiles but gives no sign that he’ll lower himself in obedience. Jen-sheng’s cheeks are darkening, sweat has ringed the collar of his robe, and his legs feel weak. He can’t stay here. He hurries through the kitchen and into the bedroom behind it.

Moments after the man’s departure, Wen Ch’i-mei re-enters the room and approaches her son, who remains pressed into the corner with his hands cupped together. She puts fidgety Tse-tan on his feet. The small boy wanders off to investigate a centipede crawling on the room’s central
k’ang
—a brick- and wood-planked platform for sitting with a cooking stove built into the earth beneath it.

“
Shisan yazi
, what is this?” Wen Ch’i-mei asks Tse-tung as she shakes her head mournfully. “Don’t you know heaven’s involved now, the date’s decreed, it’s out of your hands?”

“Heaven has nothing to do with it, Mother,” replies the scowling Tse-tung. His eyes are lowered, but his lips are twisting in paroxysms of confusion and despair. He doesn’t look so strong and confident now. “She’s not my bride. She’s just another person around the house to clean pig shit. Another woman to wash underwear and get commanded by Father. You, of all people, should know that.”

“Ogh,” moans his mother. “How you’re killing me, Tse-tung. This behaviour, it’s not right. Left in limbo out there, the spirits will devour her.”

Tse-tung’s eyes moisten. All day it’s been easy for him to understand the stupidity, greed, and small-mindedness behind this wedding. He can see it in the smug expression on his father’s face. Tse-tung knows he’s capable of standing firm against a demand that’s so obviously wrong, regardless of the consequences. But now that he hears the anxiety and fear in his mother’s voice, now that he feels her panic, he’s not so sure what’s the right or wrong thing for him to do. Tse-tung regards his mother and squints to prevent his tears from falling.

“How can you make me,” he starts, “after all that you—”

“No.”

“I won’t have her,” he whispers. “I can’t have her. Send her back.”

“She’s not going back.”

“Then let her rot in that sedan! She can burn up in the heat, for all I care. I hate her! I don’t want anything to do with her.”

“Shhh! Tse-tung! Shame on you. They can hear.”

“I don’t care! She’s a rotten bride and I don’t want to get married.”

Tse-tung is surprised by the vehemence of his resistance. He thought his rebellion was a principled stance against the avarice of his father. Nothing more and nothing less. It shouldn’t have anything to do with him personally. He shouldn’t care so much. But now the tears are flowing freely down his chubby cheeks.

Wen Ch’i-mei touches her son’s face, still so much the baby’s, and straightens his silk hat. He’d acted like a man against his father, tall and strong and unyielding, but this person standing before her seems to be a confused child. He’s trembling and biting his lip, terrified and blubbering.

“Mama,” he whispers. “I don’t want to.”

“Dry your tears,
shisan yazi
. Everyone must get married. It’s duty. It’s good for the family, and for me. She’s welcome here. I could use her help. And it’s a marriage decreed in heaven, you already know. The ancestors did not object to the eight-character match. So the thread is tied and it’s all set.”

“No,” he whimpers.

“No more, Tse-tung. You’re still my eldest.” She hesitates and shrugs, peering up at her tall son. “That is, if you’ll continue to have your poor mother as your own …”

“Of course I will,” says Tse-tung, cupping his slender fingers around his mother’s face.

“All right,” she replies, stepping back. “So don’t worry. You’ll have many sons. And I won’t work Miss Luo too hard.
Just the help I need. I will speak kindly. She’s lucky to have a mother-in-law like me.”

Tse-tung grins and nods his agreement. “Very lucky,” he says.

“She could’ve gotten a monster.”

“Everyone but you is a monster.”

“Dry your face. Today is
ch’in ying
. You’re very fortunate. You’re getting married.”

He brushes away his tears and sniffles. “She’ll be ugly,” he whispers. “I’ll find her repulsive.”

“She’s pretty,” says his mother.

“How can you say that? She won’t be beautiful.”

“She’s waiting too long in that sedan. The longer she’s exposed, the greater chance the evil spirits will have her.”

Tse-tung moves to the threshold and gazes into the courtyard, taking stock of the situation and wondering if he’s really going to go through with it. The matchmaker glares at him, her lips curling in disgust. Tse-tung’s protestations have made this match seem less than ideal, which is very bad for her credibility. The sedan carriers stand at quasi-military attention, fighting off grins. He scans their rough and sun-drenched faces, registering the mockery in their eyes, the way they’re resisting laughter. It’s clear they think this boy-husband is an embarrassment and a joke.

Tse-tung hardens with anger. The challenge of the sedan carriers burns away his weakness and childishness as quickly as it flooded him, and now he sees all these smirking peasants before him as hypocrites and narrow-minded slaves, made in
his father’s mould, more worthy of shame than he will ever be. They are stupid peasants, with nothing but their blind acceptance of a superstitious rite. They can’t read a book, but still they think they know the proper way to behave?

Tse-tung’s anger and hatred forge inside him an iron will, but he doesn’t yet know what he’ll do with it, what he wants to do with it. His vision clouds over with white rage and he feels himself stepping out into the yard, ready to stand face to face with these peasant cowards but unsure how exactly he’s going to act on his indignation. He approaches the closed sedan.

Before he’s made any decision about what to do next, the matchmaker removes a small key and inserts it into a tiny lock on the sedan’s door. The lock’s purpose is clearly symbolic; a single hard tug would break its clasp. Tse-tung kicks the bright red door, announcing his presence and his command over his bride, while the matchmaker turns the key. The sedan opens.

On the far side of the courtyard, Wu lights another string of firecrackers to ward off any lingering evil spirits, and then steps back to watch them explode. As the firecrackers belch black smoke, the labourer grins with unrestrained glee. Tse-tung realizes that he’s just begun the ceremony. Two of the nearby carriers reach inside the sedan and withdraw the unnamed woman of Luo, her face covered by a worn piece of embroidered red silk dangling from a large phoenix crown. She wears a red dress made of rough homespun cotton and her hair is fastened against her head. The two carriers heave
as they lift the young woman into the air, and then across the stone threshold of Mao Jen-sheng’s home. Inside the farmhouse, they set her down upon her tiny, crushed feet.

Tse-tung forgets his rage as he follows his bride to the threshold. He is standing on the cool earth, unable to take his eyes off those feet. He didn’t expect this. Could they be real? Is this woman standing before him, this actual living person, really his intended bride? A foot-bound woman for a wife would indeed befit a family of increasing economic station like the Maos, a family in possession of many paddies, of twenty-two
mou
precisely. Woman Luo’s heavy cloth shoes are drawn into points at the toes, as if the flesh inside were shaped like ducks’ bills. Although her footwear is fashioned from rough red cotton and sealed with bulky metal clasps—entirely lacking the silk-and-flower elegance of a rich lady in Peking—and her feet remain a few inches bigger than the three-inch lotuses of classical perfection, still this young woman’s bindings are unspeakably exotic.

Mao Tse-tung’s hungry eyes feast on these delicious morsels. His legs tremble and his throat constricts. Is he really to be as indulged as the Hunanese governor in his Changsha
yamen
? His heart is pounding so strongly he’s losing breath and growing dizzy. How does he even imagine touching such little jewels?

For Tse-tung, the wedding is no longer a theoretical possibility, not just another in a long string of battles with his infuriating father, but an actual ceremony between him and this foot-bound woman. Still, the groom can’t seem to
move from the threshold. The nakedness of his surprise transforms his features into the open stare and slack mouth of an innocent child.

Unnamed woman Luo wobbles from side to side like a gradually slowing top. She walks on her small feet towards Jen-sheng, who has re-emerged from his bedroom to stand regally beside the earthen
k’ang
with his proud chin raised like a pompous governor, his moustache imperial and his frown foreboding. He waits for her to reach him. The bride’s arms are swinging like frantic pendulums to balance her precariously shifting weight. When she reaches her father-in-law, woman Luo tucks her crisp cotton robe beneath her knees and kneels before him. Three times the young woman knocks her forehead against the brushed floor. Jen-sheng offers a thin smile in acceptance of his daughter-in-law’s
k’ou-t’ou
.

Tse-tung is playing with the split hairs at the end of his long queue, the hairstyle mandated by the Manchu authorities. His braid stretches from the ridge on the back of his skull down to the top of his buttocks, while the rest of his head is shaved. Roused from stunned incredulity by the hissing of his mother, he looks towards her. His mother is widening her eyes at him and he realizes—yes, of course—that it’s time to perform the next action prescribed by the rite.

He moves to woman Luo’s left, and together the bride and groom
k’ou-t’ou
towards the entrance. Tse-tung fires a quick glance at his bride’s covered face but catches no glimpse of her, no indication of her appearance. They step before the ancestral tablets mounted against a small wall
and again kneel in obeisance. Neither the sweet incense burning nor the bride’s faint smell of pomelo wash can mask the encroaching putrid odour of the old matchmaker, who has entered the room behind the couple and now lingers by the front door, awaiting the festive meal. The couple bows to the tablets of the Mao clan’s ancestors, to heaven and Earth, and again to the altar of the Kitchen God, Tsao-Chün. All as prescribed. All as expected.

Now unnamed woman Luo shuffles into the kitchen. The perspiring boy’s parents pull out their chairs and sit beside each other, near the ancestral wall. The bride boils water and prepares the cups. When Luo re-enters with the formal tray and ceremonial tea, Tse-tung concentrates on remaining motionless, on keeping his legs from trembling, his teeth from grinding.

Woman Luo performs the tea ceremony impeccably. Tse-tung can see she’s been well trained. She doesn’t have to sacrifice her dainty steps for additional stability. She executes a
k’ou-t’ou
before his parents in one smooth movement. Her wrists, as she hands them tea, bend at a pleasing angle. Tse-tung observes his father’s wide grin at the success of this wedding, and although he’s partly enraged by Jen-sheng’s ownership of the event, he’s also proud of his bride. The tea is sweet, perfectly saturated with lotus seeds and red dates. Both parents lick their lips. It’s true, this Luo woman will make a perfect wife. Tse-tung can’t help but regard the half moon of her behind through her tight-fitting dress.

Tse-tung has been entitled to expose her face since the moment she entered their home, but only now, as the bride
and groom bow to each other, ending the ceremony, does he recall his right. He watches his trembling hands lift the phoenix crown off her head, the veil rising with it. The metal decorations along the crown’s fringes tinkle and ring; Tse-tung can’t keep his arms still. Unnamed woman Luo stares demurely at the ground. She’s a beautiful girl—a small mouth, wide-set eyes, full cheeks with high bones, smooth and unblemished skin—but the deadness in her expression astonishes Tse-tung. She’s blinking, but otherwise shows no sign of life. The groom places the wedding crown on the table.

She’s like a statue. Nothing there.

The sun is setting outside. The farmhouse, though still scorching, is slowly growing dark. Unnamed woman Luo returns to the kitchen to prepare the festive meal as Wen Ch’i-mei lights a lantern. Jen-sheng pulls out a chair at the table for the village go-between. Jen-sheng ventures into the kitchen and returns, grumbling curses, carrying several bowls of rice. He goes into the courtyard and pays the sedan carriers and his labourer Wu with the simple dinner. He’s about to come back inside, but then changes his mind and offers each man a single tael without meeting their eyes. They
k’ou-t’ou
gratefully, puffs of dust rising when their foreheads touch the dry earth. Woman Luo brings out bowls of noodles, an earthenware jug of water, and, for a treat, a glutinous rice egg-cake.