The Language of Threads (30 page)

1950

The first letter had arrived like an unexpected gift. It was an early spring day and Li awoke with a strange sensation, a flutter of anxiety that came and went. Since the farmer had died four years ago, she moved about her daily routine, freed of the responsibilities that once kept her a virtual prisoner on the farm. Her sons were grown and gone, and the old farmer had died a slow and painful death. The house no longer felt like a jail. Its walls were simply a rough and faded shell, just as worn and old a relic as she'd become at the age of forty-one. Li's days passed quietly, the scars of her past life slowly healing. It had taken her a while to no longer feel afraid of the looming shadows that always came at twilight—the ghosts of the old farmer and his son, Hun, returning from the groves.

The knocking had startled her. It was solid and persistent. Li moved toward the battered door tentatively, thinking it might be Party members coming to have her relocated. The village letter writer, old man Sai, had warned of these visits. Li sighed and cracked open the door. But instead of the Party officials she'd
expected to see standing there, she saw two peasant women, dressed in cotton tunics and straw hats.

The heavyset one spoke first. “We're looking for Mui Chung Li.”

“She isn't here,” Li answered cautiously.

“Do you know when she'll return?”

Li shook her head.

The woman smiled, not unkindly. “Will you give her this letter? It's from her sister, Pei.”

She held out a blue envelope and Li's heart jumped at the sight of her own name, written in bold black characters.

“Pei?” Li had said, her voice rising at the sound of her sister's name. At first she hesitated to take the letter, thinking it might be some kind of trick. She thought about her sons, Kaige and Yuan, and wondered if the Party was somehow testing her loyalty.

“My name is Chen Ling, and this is Ming. We are Pei's silk sisters.” The thin, quiet woman next to the heavyset one smiled shyly at the sound of her name. “Pei heard of her sister Li's visit to the girls' house and wants very much for her to have this letter. Please, we have come a long way to deliver it.”

It had to be true, Li thought. It
was
a letter from Pei. Why else would these two women have traveled so far to bring it to her? Li swung open the door and sunlight flooded the dark room.

“I am Li,” she confessed.

Chen Ling broke into a big smile. “I never doubted it for one moment.”

“How could you know?” Li asked, her hand rising instantly to touch her dry cheek and the raised, puckered scar that ran down it to the corner of her mouth. More years had passed than she could remember since anyone had come to visit. She must look terrible in her coarse muslin tunic and trousers. Li took a step back into the house.

It was quiet Ming who then spoke up. “Because you and Pei have the same beautiful eyes.”

Since Chen Ling and Ming's visit, Li had received two more letters from Pei through old man Sai, who was also the uncle of a high-ranking Party official. He had made it possible for Pei and Li's letters to go back and forth unimpeded for the time being. A red stamp of approval marked the front of each envelope. She marveled at how her life could suddenly change after so many years of stagnation.

Li set the three envelopes down on the scarred wooden table and gazed at them in disbelief. Their lightness surprised her; how could thirty years of questions and answers feel so weightless? Her trembling fingers pulled out the sheets once again. Ma Ma had taught her and Pei to read and write when they were young, but she'd had little time to make use of her skills working on the farm. Now, in the fading light of day, Li stared at the careful lines and felt like a child again. It took the longest time before some of the characters revealed a familiar shape and meaning. What she couldn't read herself, Li had asked old man Sai to read to her so many times, she had each sentence of Pei's letters memorized.

“Tell me about your life. I've prayed for your happiness.”

The old farmer she had married at the age of fifteen had stolen her youth, then tried his best to squeeze the remaining life out of her. Li's days consisted of cooking, cleaning, and working in the groves; at night, she lay under him while he took his pleasure. During the first year of her marriage, Li had thought daily about ending her life. It would be as easy as throwing herself down the well, or slicing her wrists with the kitchen knife.

Even now, with the old farmer dead and buried, Li still winced at the thought of him and of their life together. There wasn't a day that he'd been kind to her. When he didn't beat her or force himself on her, he ignored her completely. His two children by his first wife gave her little respect. How could they think of her
as their mother, when she was roughly the same age as they? At least the farmer's daughter had helped her with the household duties, until two years later, when the farmer gave her away in marriage. Li could still see the fear in the girl's eyes the day she rode off to join her new husband's family. Li wanted to say something to her, but knew she felt like an animal caught in a trap, wanting to gnaw off her own limb in order to get away.

But it was the old farmer's son Hun who became the real source of Li's misery. Even the worst beating the farmer could give her wouldn't have been as bad as the constant torment Hun inflicted on her mind and body. It began on the first day of her arrival, when the sixteen-year-old sneered at her and said, “You're nothing but a little whore. Don't think you'll ever replace my mother!” He hated her until he died, twenty years later, at the hands of a Japanese soldier. Li could never really call the Japanese “devils”; as she saw it, they had killed the real devil.

In the last days of his life, the old farmer lay screaming in pain and dribbling like a baby. Even then, he couldn't let go of his cruelty; it burned in his eyes as they followed her around the room. Li did what she could to make him comfortable, then watched as he clung to his pitiful life, afraid to let go.

“Do you have children? Am I an aunt?”

Li might have ended her life, if she hadn't soon become pregnant with her first son, Kaige. The idea that a new life could grow inside her, no matter how barren and desolate the life of the outside, renewed her spirit. Two years later, she gave birth to Yuan. The lives of her sons took precedence, while hers no longer mattered. Kaige and Yuan became the thin threads that kept Li alive.

Kaige was quiet and sensitive, though a hard worker and as good to her as he could be. As a boy, he could do little but hide when his father became enraged and beat Li. As a young man of eighteen, he worked quietly in the groves, but one night begged her and Yuan to go away with him, away from the beatings. Where? How? Li had asked. They had no money and nowhere to
hide. The next morning, Kaige was gone. She saw his empty bed in the corner and heard a great howl surge through her body. After two months, though, she received word through a friend of Kaige's that he was fine. A year later, he'd joined the Communist Party, in which men and women were equal, and he'd found a new family of his own.

Her younger son, Yuan, was a happy, outgoing child. Li often thought it was her only compensation that a child conceived under such terrible circumstances could find such ease in life. She swallowed and remembered that terrible day as if it were just yesterday. She had come in from the fields to begin cooking their evening meal, dribbling cool water from the well down her neck; out of nowhere, Hun grabbed her from behind and dragged her into the barn. He'd still been angry with her from the night before. The old farmer had been berating him for not having fed the cow, and Li, who tried to calm little Kaige's squealing, began to sing softly to him. Hun had thought they were making fun of him and stormed out of the house.

“Now I'll teach you a lesson,” he hissed.

Before Li had time to scream, he was on top of her, tearing at her cotton trousers and forcing her legs apart with one hand, while his other hand gripped her neck, choking the breath out of her. He rammed himself inside her with such force, Li wished his choking would kill her. She felt his grip tighten, her lungs losing their fight for air, but she scratched wildly at him when she thought of having to leave little Kaige. She choked red, then blue, giving up the struggle as her arms felt as heavy as lead. The world spun dark around her, and except for leaving Kaige, she couldn't imagine not being happier in the other world.

Then, suddenly, Hun let go. Li gulped air and began to revive. She coughed, alive again. Hun pulled away from her, then stood up and started laughing. “That'll teach you to laugh at me, you cow!” He yanked up his pants and glared down at her. The next time she opened her eyes he was gone from the barn.

Li lay gasping for air, unable to move; her desire to live slowly
returned with each breath. When she heard the old farmer walking up from the mulberry groves, she forced her aching body up from the ground and into the house before he saw her. Another breath. Another beating. He never paid attention to the red prints around her neck, which days later turned to black and blue. Even to her, one bruise resembled any other.

Yuan was the child she gave birth to nine months later. During her pregnancy, Li thought she would hate the baby. How could she love the son of a devil? But his birth had been as easy as his temperament. As soon as Li saw his smiling eyes, she knew it was impossible for her not to love him. Yuan was the child that even the old farmer came to adore; Hun never realized the boy he hated so much was his own son.

“I can't imagine what you must look like. You were the one who had Ma Ma's beautiful hair.”

Li touched her short gray hair. Ma Ma's beautiful hair was a distant memory. Li had worn hers short for more years than she could remember, since just after Yuan's birth. Her long hair felt heavy and hot during the hot summer when she carried the baby strapped to her back and worked in the mulberry groves. She went back inside the dark farmhouse and quickly cut her hair off with a kitchen knife. “What have you done to yourself?” the old farmer roared, and slapped her so hard she fell, cutting her cheek against the edge of the table. It bled for hours and she heard a ringing in her ear for days after. “If I wanted a boy, I would have married one!” Still, in Li's one open act of defiance, her hair remained short from that day on.

“I hope Baba died in peace. I was able to see Ma Ma one time before she died, when I was still doing the silk work.”

Li never saw her parents again after her customary visit home after three days of marriage. Ma Ma knew the farmer had beaten her, and had quietly told her to stay home. “It's not too late,” she said. “It will bring us no shame.” Li had wanted to run and hold her mother, tell her how frightened she'd been and how the
farmer had hurt her, but she couldn't move and the words froze on her tongue. It broke her heart to have to leave home again, but Li had refused to be a “return bride,” to dishonor her family.

The news of her father's death came a lifetime later.

One morning after the farmer's death, Li had awakened to the realization that everyone in her life had died or drifted far away. Even Yuan had followed his brother and joined the Communist Party after the Japanese surrender; he now lived far away, near Chungking. She rarely saw him or Kaige anymore, though they sent her messages and small packages of food when they could.

At forty-one years old, Li was finally free to do as she pleased. As if some strange voice were calling to her, she was summoned to return to her childhood home. The next morning she borrowed an ox and cart to make the day's journey. As she approached her father's farm, a flood of memories returned. She saw again the two little girls running down to the fish ponds. Pei would lie in the red dirt, sucking on sugar candy and questioning Li as to what the fish were thinking about. Pei was always seeking answers to the unknown. Li had snapped back at her, but secretly wanted to see life just the way she did.

The morning young Li had awakened to find Baba and Pei gone, she knew her sister wouldn't be returning. She leaned over to find Pei's side of the bed already cold. Her mother sat by herself and could barely look at her when Li asked where Pei was. “She won't be back,” her mother had said, her eyes red and filling with tears. “She has another life as a silk worker now.” Li had been stunned. She hadn't even gotten to say good-bye, or to give her playful sister one last piece of sugar candy. Li distinctly remembered her silent mother putting a bowl of jook on the table for her, the soft crackling of the fire under the iron pot, and the hard realization of how quiet it would be with Pei gone.

Now, Li continued down the dirt road, and saw strangers moving about her father's land. They sadly told her of her father's lonely death six months earlier. But the good of it—they smiled up to her—was that her father's farm was now being used as a Communist collective. The following week Li went in search of Pei in the village of Yung Kee.