Calls Across the Pacific (28 page)

“Nice to meet you again,” Nina greeted her.

“She's my old pal, Nina, from Yunnan, from the Number Five Military Farm before I went to Burma.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Mya smiled.

Jianzhong tiptoed over to a reclining chair made of bamboo. “My kid's napping,” he whispered, gently moving the hair of his daughter off her forehead. Then he asked his wife, “Can you make a fire over there?”

Nina moved over to the child and cooed, congratulating both Jianzhong and his wife for their beautiful daughter.

Mya nodded happily. She grabbed a metal rack hanging on the side of the stand with one hand and lifted a pack of charcoal with the other. Nina took the plastic bags Jianzhong had brought from the store and followed Mya to the firepit. Mya lit the charcoal and set the grill rack over it. She gestured to a small square table near the brazier indicating to Nina that she should lay the packages there.

Jianzhong in the meantime set three chairs around the table under the shelter. “You can join us,” he said to his wife.

Mya waved her hand. “I'm not hungry. So, please help yourselves.”

Jianzhong opened up the different packages and laid out pork ribs, lamb chops, beefsteaks, and fish fillets on the grill. Nina added the all-seasoned salt. The delicious scent soon rose up their nostrils. Jianzhong filled two glasses with beer and passed one to Nina. “Cheers to being alive!”

“Cheers!” Nina raised her beer glass. The semi-transparent, amber liquid in the glass shone in the sunlight. As the unremitting and droning call of the cicada sounded off, the breeze over the South China Sea could be heard whispering about the past.

28.
PEACE AND QUIET AFTERWARDS

N
INA DID NOT WANT
Jianzhong to lose customers though she was longing to hear his story. At her suggestion, Jianzhong reopened his store and resumed service. Customers soon swarmed in the shop. Nina helped with the checkout while he unpacked goods and found items for customers.

After the buyers left, Nina relaxed in a chair; Jianzhong leaned against the freezer, immersed in thought. In response to her question, he said, “Those years I was so poisoned by that international revolution, as was Dahai. Otherwise, we would not have wanted to join the Viet Cong. You know we ended up in Burma because we met a young Burmese by chance. He spoke Chinese and convinced us to join the People's Army run by the Communist Party of Burma instead.”

“What did the People's Army do? What did you do with them?”

“They struggled for independence from Great Britain and then fought against the Burmese government. In 1967, Chairman Thakin Than Tun carried out his revolution. I think he copied old Mao.” Jianzhong paused for a second, his hand shaking, and then sipped his tea. “In a bloody battle against the Burmese government's troops in 1970, Dahai died. I was injured in a mine explosion. When I was able to walk, I went back to the explosion spot. The hillsides were covered in burnt branches and bush. The land was blood-stained, full of bombed pits, pieces of torn clothing, dark shells, and broken rifles.”

Jianzhong's recollection brought Nina to the mound that had been a grave for hundreds of killed soldiers. She envisioned a lanky young man with a bandaged leg hobbling across the scrubby hills to the tomb, around which jumbles of charred plant remains swayed in the wind. Jianzhong had wandered, but he could not find where Dahai's bones had been buried. He had pulled out a piece of wood carved with his friend's name and inserted it into the soil on the mound. Around the marker, Jianzhong had lain several wild flowers he had picked from the nearby fields. When she imagined what Dahai had felt and thought in his last moments, Nina's throat tightened
.
She still remembered his last words before going to battle — how he was determined to use his own blood to wash off his parents' anti-revolutionary crimes.
He was so brainwashed! If only he had fled with me, he would've seen a completely different world. But, there's no room left for “what ifs.”
She sighed.

Jianzhong helped another customer. Then, he came back and sat on a stool at the counter next to her. “I have regrets, but I can't do anything about them. I don't think too much about what's happened in the past.” He seemed to be able to read Nina's mind. “Dahai and I thought we could clear away our folks' sins, and prove we were loyal to Mao by joining the international revolution. His death made me rethink the meaning of life and death.

“On the anniversary of the Kyuhkok battle, during which the Communist Party of Burma Army won over the Burmese government in March 1971, I met with many other enlisted Chinese soldiers. They were sent-down youth from Yunnan's rural areas like us. Following the call of the Voice of the People of Burma on the radio, they crossed the border to devote themselves to the revolution. We sat on rocks or patches of weeds around bonfires. We bit into roasted pork and drank wine from coconut bowls. I recalled the Chen Sheng Wu Guang Uprising. Do you remember? We learned about it in Chinese history class in the third grade. I thought I was a part of a modern version of the same kind of uprising. I asked myself: ‘What's our purpose? If the Army wins and the Burmese government is thrown over, can we build a better Burma?' As a matter of fact, after the Chen Sheng Wu Guang Uprising in the Qin Dynasty, China continued to be a feudalistic society for some two thousand years. I think Mao's takeover was just like a peasants' uprising but it was couched in the shiny, sloganistic phrasing of a ‘communist revolution.'

“I realized I was living a barbarian's life. After those bloody battles, we cried or laughed like ghosts in the woods. The happy memories of my childhood came flooding back. A sort of human feeling returned to me. Suddenly, I realized that I missed my folks who had been labelled anti-revolutionaries. They were my parents, and they gave me my life. Without them, there was no
me
in this world. Something mysterious in the boundless universe formed me into a living being. I thanked my parents who had given me life. The next month, I asked for a leave of absence to visit my folks back in China.

“I sneaked through the border and returned to Binyang in Guangxi Province. It was a starless night in May 1971. While I groped along a dark alley, I saw that only two street lamps were on. All the other bulbs were broken. I found my home, an apartment in a one-storey building, and thought it was strange that there was no light on inside. I tapped on the door, but nobody answered. Then, the door opened just a crack. Before I could see what was going on, a cat jumped out, fleeing past my legs. I stepped inside the door and called out, ‘Anybody home?' No response. A stale odour pushed into my nose. I slid my hand up and down the inside wall near the door to find the switch. I flipped it a couple of times, but no light came on. It was hard to tell if the bulb was broken or if the electricity had been cut. Something was terribly wrong. I retreated quickly. When I noticed a bit of light coming from the next apartment, I rushed to it and knocked on the door. Nobody answered there either. I waited. Then the bulb inside the apartment went off. An ominous sign.

“I left the apartment building and saw a figure on the street striding past. From his gait I could tell that he was an old man. I rushed toward him and asked, ‘Could you please tell me where the couple in Apartment 3 are?' The man didn't stop walking, but asked, ‘Who are you? Why are you looking for them?'

“I hesitated and then said, ‘I'm a relative of the family.' At the same time, I quickened my steps to catch up with him.

“He turned his head and stared at me. A flash appeared in his eyes under the dim streetlight. ‘Follow me. Don't speak.' He said nothing more. At that moment, I recognized him as the gatekeeper of the elementary school that I'd attended years earlier.

“I followed him along a laneway to the school. Hobbling to the hut next to the gate, he unlocked the door. ‘Come in, Jianzhong Wang.'

“I was surprised that he identified me by name. I remembered him because we schoolboys used to call him ‘Old Bachelor.' When the light flickered on, I saw a single bed against the wall. He still lived alone, and he had aged. He gestured for me to sit down on a stool, and then he leaned his wizened body down into a dark brown wooden armchair by the door….”

Jianzhong's story was interrupted when several customers walked into the store. They asked for pork ribs. More shoppers joined the crowd and Nina stood up to help at the counter. It was almost six p.m. The busiest time was just beginning.

An hour later, Mya came into the store carrying their daughter in a sling on her back. “I'll throw together supper,” she said to Nina as she made her way past the freezers to a door at the back of the room. She pulled it open and stepped into their living quarters. “Baby, we're at home.” She took her child off her back and lay her down on a mat near the door. Nina followed Mya into the room and started to help her with the cooking. The three adults then took turns eating supper, so that someone could keep an eye on the store.

In the evening, after her daughter fell asleep, Mya went back to the beach to look after her barbecue braziers. Jianzhong kept the store open. “I'm going to take some time off tomorrow and show you around.”

“Thanks, but you don't have to,” Nina said. “Weekends are a perfect time for you to make some money. I don't want you to lose a Sunday. I can stay for another couple of hours just to chat.”

Nina left at midnight, promising Jianzhong she would keep in touch with him. After waving goodbye, and asking him to give her regards to his wife, she took the last bus back to Hong Kong Island.

In bed at the hotel, Nina did not fall asleep right away though she was exhausted. Jianzhong's story about his parents haunted her. She was still in shock about the cannibalism that had happened in 1969 — the year Jianzhong and Dahai fled the military farm. According to the school gatekeeper, a militia leader had given a speech at a meeting to denounce the Five Black Categories: ex-landowners, the rich, anti-revolutionaries, evils, and labelled rightists. Then he had suggested that all the revolutionary villagers murder and then eat those enemies. Jianzhong's parents had been repatriated from Guangzhou to Binyang County after they were branded as rightists in 1958. During that barbaric raid, along with other victims, his parents had been beaten, murdered, and parts of their bodies had been cooked and then eaten. The gatekeeper had told Jianzhong to get as far away as possible to hide from persecution.

He had run, but he had not returned to the Burmese army. When he reached a small town called Lashio, he found a job in a restaurant owned by a Chinese-Burmese man. The owner introduced him to his niece, who had lived in Hong Kong and was looking for a husband-to-be from her hometown. Jianzhong had jumped at the opportunity, which led him to his current, peaceful life.

With Jianzhong's happy ending lingering in her mind, Nina eventually fell asleep.

A few days later, back at home in Yarmouth, Nina lay on a reclining chair on the deck. Sunlight licked the surface of the bay, and a couple of windsurfer's colourful sails floated up and down over the waves. Hopping around on the beach, seagulls cooed or picked out food from the sand. Some small sandpipers hopped up and down the beach, and then buried their heads under their own wings to sleep. The world looked undisturbed and
amicable
in this corner along the Atlantic Ocean. But the memories of all those struggling souls amidst the turmoil caused by the bloody Cultural Revolution were like rough currents running across Nina's mind. She visualized the darkest period she and her generation had gone through on that faraway land across the Pacific Ocean.
We were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nina remembered that someone had said that to her recently.

As soon as Nina recovered from the jet lag, she started to examine the data she had collected for her book. First, she listened to the tapes she had recorded in her interviews, and then she typed up the transcripts.

Day in and day out, she got up early and stayed up late, burying herself in piles of research. She planned to finish transcribing the interviews before she actually started preparing an outline for her book. She thought of several titles, but she was not sure which one she would use.

It was Friday again. Nina spent all morning typing up the transcripts. In the afternoon, she made notes, recalling the people she had interviewed and jotting down what she still remembered so as to make comparisons with the transcripts.

She remembered something she had learned in a research seminar: Authors have a subjective point of view.
It's true that my descriptions and my opinion, regarding the events, reflect my own point of view.
She kept her eyes on the pile of paper on the desk, checking back and forth between her notes and transcripts. She mulled over being subjective or objective.

Lightning flashed across the sky, and a whirling wind blew outside. A nearby thunderbolt crack woke her from her thoughts. She got up from the chair and walked over to the grand window. Rain was pouring down; the bay looked blurry. Nina felt as if she were hearing calls from the sky, some far and some close, rebounding far across the ocean.

Realizing she was weary, she selected a tape of Chinese folk songs and inserted it into the cassette player. A high-pitched song followed the rhythmic slapping of the rain and wind against the window.

She retreated to the kitchen and started to steam rice in a pot. After slicing and shredding up some ham, she stir-fried it with scrambled eggs, peas, and onions. At last, she mixed the steamed rice with the cooked hodgepodge and then sprinkled it with soy sauce. The delectable aroma spread throughout the kitchen. When she dropped all the shredded vegetables into a pot of soup on the stove, she imagined Roger's smiling face as he walked through the door.

After Nina turned the stove off, she went into the living room and stood by the window again. The sky was once again clear.
My Green Years in the Woods
, the title Liya had given her memoir-in-progress, crossed Nina's mind.
Nina needed a title for her book too.
She was glad that they had both chosen pen and paper as their weapon to fight for human rights. She went to the office, picked up a pen, and jotted down a few words on a piece of paper:
Voices from the Cultural Revolution: Surviving Mao's Reign of Terror.

Anxious to know whether Roger, who would be the first person to read her book, would like this title, she sank into a chair by the window and waited for Roger to come home.
Dreamily, s
he looked out the bay window. The bay appeared peaceful after the downpour. Birds glided through the light blue sky, their shadows dissolving into the shiny water's surface. A gorgeous double rainbow arched over the bay and sunshine embraced the world.