Neither my father nor I talked on the bus ride to the train station. He looked older, moving more slowly than I remembered. Men his age should be thinking about retirement, but I knew he could not retire before I could support them. I felt guilty about escaping home and leaving the burden of my mother to him. How was he managing while I was not home? I asked him as we waited in the long line at the boarding entrance. He seemed surprised by my question. Nothing much to manage, he replied, and said that things were as they always were. This talk, neither here nor there, left us embarrassed, and I could see his relief when we finally boarded the train. He lifted my suitcase to the luggage rack and carefully stored the duffel bag with the eggs under my seat. Be well, then, he said, shaking my hand, again solemnly. I told him not to wait for the departure of the train, knowing he would not obey my wish. When the whistle blew, he stepped off the train and waved behind the gray and grimy window when the train inched forward, and I waved back once, thinking perhaps we were the loneliest family in the world because we were meant to be that way.
No one questioned my lie when I arrived. The camp was empty, no rushing steps on the staircase for the early morning training, no singing contest before meals so that Major Tang could determine which platoon would enter the mess hall first. The senior officers, who had families at the compound across the street, showed up once a day, and only when they were present did the junior officers—Lieutenant Wei and the other two platoon leaders, the company supply officer, and the clerk—assume a military appearance.
I began to eat with the cooking squad in the kitchen so that the officers would not be reminded of my presence. The conscripts, boys my age or younger, had joined the army to seek a future that was otherwise not available to them. I knew there were girls who were particularly close to the cooking squad—whether for friendship or an extra bite or two I could not decide. Before, I had talked to the conscripts only when our squad was on cooking duty, so I worried that they would resent a stranger, but they seemed happy that I—or perhaps any girl for that matter—chose to eat with them. They told jokes, making fun of people that I had never met, or of one another, and I tried my best to smile, since I knew they were doing it for my sake.
After each meal, I followed the two conscripts on duty to the pigsties, and then to the vegetable garden, which did not require a lot of work at this time of the year. None of us had things to rush to, so we made the outings last as long as we could. The boys took turns pushing the handcart, slowly so the slopping swill would not spill out of the buckets; at the beginning I asked to help, but they were gallant and never let me. Their jokes continued on these trips, but soon bits and pieces of their secrets surfaced. It did not take me long to figure out that each of them was in love with a girl from the company, but theirs was the most hopeless kind of love, as they would continue their lives in the army, and we would be gone by summer. When the boys began to confess, I did not ask questions or make comments; all they needed was someone not in their position to listen to them, so I did. None of the girls being dreamed about was me, though the conscripts did not seem to sense any awkwardness in confessing to a girl they had collectively dismissed as undesirable.
I wished this life could go on forever. When the swill was poured into the trough, white steam rose into the chilly air, and the pigs, already snorting with impatience, pushed against one another—but sooner or later, satisfied by a good meal, they would calm down. The conscripts cleaned the trough and then the sties, and the pigs found their favorite spots to lie in the sun. The pigs’ needs were simple, their happiness easily granted; the boys were in pain, but still they joked, their dreams laughable to their companions and themselves alike. If I climbed atop the low brick wall of the pigsties, I could see the shooting range, and the hill beyond that was turning yellowish green. The earth in the vegetable garden softened every day, and soon another planting season would begin, but when harvest time came, we girls would be back in the civilian world. If I focused on the joyful squeals of the pigs, I could pretend my parents did not exist; in the sun-filled vegetable garden, who were Professor Shan and Nini’s father but phantoms in one’s fantasies?
The night before the other girls returned from leave, Lieutenant Wei found me in the barracks. Apart from brief greetings, she had left me alone the past few days, and I wondered if my early return was an inconvenience. Sometimes I could hear, from the hallway, her voice along with the other officers. One night a few male officers from the boys’ companies had visited, and their laughing and singing had not ended until after midnight.
“So, I see you’re getting yourself ready ahead of time,” Lieutenant Wei said. She examined the barracks, which I had been cleaning daily.
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Did you have a good leave? Was your family well?”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Why did you come back early, then?”
“I misremembered the date, Lieutenant,” I said.
Perhaps I was disappointing her with my insistence, but disappointment can occur only where there is something to hope for in the first place. I had no hope to offer her.
“I see that you’ve spent a lot of time with the cooking squad,” she said.
“They are kind to let me help, Lieutenant.”
“But I want to remind you to keep things simple regarding them.”
“I don’t understand, Lieutenant.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “Don’t you know that you do a bad job acting dumb?”
“I consider my behavior soldierly around the cooking squad, Lieutenant.”
“You don’t have much feeling toward those poor boys, is that what you’re saying? To tell you the truth, you’re not my concern. You could suffer the most horrible thing and I wouldn’t give a damn. But have you ever thought about the boys? They won’t have your future. When you’re back in the city they will still be here. You don’t mess with other people’s lives and then disappear. But how can you understand other people’s pain, you city girl, full of yourself?”
We had been polite around each other since the snowstorm, and I thought we would go on maintaining that formality. If the boys of the cooking squad were in pain, I was not the one who’d caused it, I wanted to defend myself, but I knew Lieutenant Wei was talking about herself more than the conscripts. I did not give my future much thought, though other girls made it obvious, with their talk about college life and occasionally about going abroad, that we girls had futures worthy of our suffering in the army. I wondered if I could make Lieutenant Wei feel better by telling her about my parents, whom I had run away from, or about Professor Shan, whom I longed to visit again but for reasons I did not understand could not allow myself to, or Nini’s father, whom I would never see again. But animosity is easier to live with than sympathy, and indifference leaves less damage in the long run.
NINE
IN EARLY APRIL
we set out on a month-long march across Mount Dabie, hailed by Major Tang as the revolutionary cradle of our Communist nation. The expedition, planned to boost our Communist morale, was nevertheless a welcome alternative to our daily drills, and to the long hours we spent sitting in ideological seminars.
Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return. But if I close my eyes and hum the songs that we sang on the road—“The Red Azaleas,” “The Warsaw Marching Song,” “The Song of the Communist Youth,” “Under the Shining North Star”—I can see us again, lining up on the first day at the drill grounds, waiting for the lorries to arrive and transport us from the camp to an army depot in the mountains.
Don’t we look like giant snails bearing our homes on our backs?
I remember Ping’s comment—each of us carried, bundled tightly in a plastic sheet, a bedroll and a set of uniforms for changing, a heavy raincoat, two pairs of shoes, a satchel with towels, a cup, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a canteen, all arranged as compactly as possible so the items would not become more of a burden than they were. Turtles, Nan corrected Ping, and went on to tell a joke about turtles, though hard as I try now, I can remember only the laughter around her after she finished the joke.
We were jostled in the covered lorries, for hours it seemed, on the winding mountain road, and our excitement was slowly replaced by exhaustion. On a particularly uneven stretch of road, Nan stood up from where she was sitting on her bedroll, and worked loose the rope that bound the two roof tarps together. Lieutenant Wei, who was sitting at the other end, ordered her to sit down. Nan looked out the gap for a long moment and then retied the tarps as best she could. “If the lorry missed a turn, we would die together,” she said to no one in particular, and began to sing in English:
If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles
.
Her voice was more sorrowful than ever, though there was a smile on her face. Lieutenant Wei seemed to be as stricken as we were, even though she could not understand what Nan was singing. When the song ended, we listened to the tree branches scratching the tarp and pebbles bumping off the wheels of the lorry. I wondered why sadness seemed to roll off Nan as raindrops roll off a lotus leaf, without leaving any trace; I wondered how one could acquire as unaffected a soul as she had.
We stayed in the army depot that night, the last time during the journey we would be sleeping in bunk beds—later we would sleep on the unpaved dirt floors of village schools, and in the meeting halls of People’s Communes from the fifties that were no longer in use, and in the field, our whole squad squeezed together in a small patch of space. I would soon learn to let my defenses down, but on that first night, when the mountain air chilled our bones and made our teeth chatter, I again refused to share a bed with a squad mate.
At three o’clock in the morning, I was shaken awake for my night-watch duty. I wrapped myself in a quilt and went into the yard, and took my position under the brick wall. The night was clear and cold, the stars so close that one could almost reach them by raising a hand. An owl hooted and was answered by another, and I remembered the story—one of the few my father had told me—about the owls that carried the message of death: They would spend each night counting the hairs in a person’s eyebrows, and when they finished counting at daybreak, that person would die. When the owl hooted again, I shivered and rubbed my eyebrows, as my father had done for me when I was little, so the owls cannot count your eyebrows, he had said, his gentle touch on my eyebrows a comfort.
Jie, the other girl on night duty, shone her flashlight at me from where she was sitting at the foot of a tree. I clicked on my flashlight and waved back. A minute later she trotted over. “Are you cold?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No.”
“Are you lonely?”
Jie arranged her quilt around her and said she would sit with me, and I did not remind her that, if we were discovered, we would both get into trouble. We sat back to back, leaning onto each other, both huddled with our machine guns, though we had not been supplied with ammunition. Jie had behaved casually around me since the winter, and I wondered if it was natural for friendship to be formed out of shared secrets; she was the closest friend I had ever had.
“If some bad guys came, we could do nothing,” Jie said.
“We’d whistle and then run,” I said, searching my quilt for the whistle I had been supplied along with the gun.
Jie laughed lightly and asked me if I realized the irony of our hugging guns that would not shoot. I don’t understand, I said, though I did; Jie was fond of telling me off-color jokes, as if my reading
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
for her had qualified me to hear all the secrets she said she could not share with the others.
“Have you ever been in love?” Jie said.
“No,” I said.
“Sometimes you miss someone so much that all of a sudden you can’t remember how he looks or sounds,” she said, and asked if I had ever experienced that.
I thought about Nini’s father, whose face I could call up if I wanted to, though I rarely did; I thought about Professor Shan, whose voice came more easily to me than her face.
“My boyfriend and I—we did it in the winter.”
“Like they did in the novel?” I asked.
Jie told me not to believe anything I’d read in that book. “You think you will remember every moment, every detail, but the truth is, I can’t remember much about it. Can’t even remember how long we were at it.”
How could one forget such things? I could recall many details of the afternoons in Professor Shan’s flat, the last sunshine of the day slanting in from the window, her fingers slowly turning the pages, a cricket chirping from under one of the old trunks; I had not forgotten a single word that Nini’s father had said to me on the night of his divorce.
“Let me ask you—if two people love each other, doesn’t it mean that every minute of one’s life matters to the other?”
I had never loved someone, I said, so I would not know. Jie said that in that case, she was asking for directions from a blind person. Her boyfriend was not interested in her life in the army; he saw it as a nuisance that kept them apart for a year. “But won’t you remember tonight fifty years from now?” Jie asked. “I wish he’d remember these things with me. Two heads are better than one.”
“In bed,” I said. Jie laughed and said she did not know I could be naughty. It was a pity that I was in his place, I said, and Jie told me not to make fun of her. I was sad that she did not understand I meant it: She and I would drift apart once we left the army; we were not close, not even real friends. I would not be the one to carry the memory of tonight for her.
I wished her boyfriend were here; I wished too that someone other than Jie were next to me, someone who one day would share the memory of the mountains with me. The wish, illogical as it was, persisted into the following days when we marched in the mountains. It was sunny in those days, the sky blue, red azaleas wild on the cliffs. If one looked up, one could see the long line of green figures ahead, disappearing and then reappearing along with the winding road, and when one quieted her steps momentarily, the singing of the companies behind would drift uphill. In the valleys, there were creeks, and sometimes a river, and there was always a lone fisherman sitting in the shade of his wide-brimmed straw hat, and a long-legged white egret nearby, neither disturbing the other. When the mountains were replaced by rolling hills we knew that we were approaching a village: First came the fields of purple milk vetch that unfolded like giant rugs, white and yellow butterflies busying themselves in and out of the lavender blossoms; closer to the village, there were rice paddies, and water buffaloes with bare-footed boys sitting astride them; once in a while a sow would spread herself across the narrow road that led into the village, a litter of piglets pushing against her. Small children chased after us, calling us Auntie Soldiers and begging for candies. Even the youngest ones knew not to eat them right away—they gingerly licked the candies and then wrapped them up so they would last days, perhaps even weeks. Feeling guiltily privileged compared to the children, we competed to offer them treats, but sooner or later we would leave them behind and march on until dusk fell, when smoke could be seen rising from the field kitchen in the valley.