• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 412 0

’ve gone from losing the one man in my life who mattered to me to gaining two new and unique men. They distract me. They thrill me, but in different ways, of course. And for some minutes, and even hours, during the day I’m able to drive my father Sam from my mind. But it’s not easy. When I think of my dad, I know he’d be unhappy to see me here. He wouldn’t want me working in the fields, washing out my nightstool, letting my skin burn under the hot sun, or—and this he would have objected to most of all—spending time with Tao, alone and for hours on end. My dad never would have said it—he would have left it to my mother—but he would have been very disappointed in me. He would have worried that I had ruined my chances for what he called a real American life.

My remorse over these things is minor. A part of me feels that the harsh sunlight is burning away my past and that the hard work is chopping away my past mistakes. Every night when I crawl into bed—my skin dirty and every muscle exhausted—I feel wiped clean, and I can sleep. In the morning, when the dark mass of guilt inside my chest—which hasn’t left me for one minute since I saw my father hanging from a rope in his closet—threatens to well up and overpower me, I throw on my clothes and join the others with a smile on my face. I can’t forget the way my mother and aunt lied to me and fought over me, even though I turned out to be so undeserving of their worry or affection. Yes, I’ve escaped the blaming eyes of my mother and the reproachful eyes of my aunt, but I can’t escape myself. The only things I can do to save myself are pull the weeds in the fields, let my emotions for Tao envelop me, and obey what Z.G. tells me to do with a paintbrush, pencil, charcoal, or pastel.

Joy

STANDING AGAINST THE WIND AND WAVES

WE’VE BEEN REHEARSING for many days and we’re ready to give our show about women, the Marriage Law, and right thinking in the New Society. Drums, cymbals, and horns beckon people from their homes. Firecrackers snap and spark, announcing that a celebration is about to take place. It’s late on a Sunday afternoon. Most people have had the day off to rest, mend their clothes, and play with their children. Now everyone in Green Dragon comes to the square just outside the villa to watch our performance. Five little girls—in matching blouses, pink ribbons in their hair, and trailing long paper streamers—run through the clusters of people. Boys dole out paper cones brimming with peanuts or watermelon seeds, which the villagers crack between their teeth.

The makeshift stage is set up in the Chinese way, with no curtain and everything open for all to see. The musicians continue their clamorous tune, while a group of men from the propaganda team’s acrobatic troupe tumble and spin across the stage. The program begins with a recounting of some of Mao and the Red Army’s triumphs during the War of Liberation. Next, the propaganda team’s actors perform a vignette to illustrate the Twelve Point Measure to increase farm production. The content is nothing new. I know the villagers in Green Dragon already do these things, because I’ve done them or seen them myself. I’ve carried water buckets hanging from a pole across my shoulders to the fields, spread manure by hand, sprinkled nightsoil on cabbage plants, and every day Tao and I pass a water buffalo that’s guided back and forth over rocks to crush them, breaking down the soil so that a new field can be made. In my first days here, I worried about the creature. It wore blinders and had stumbled on the sharp rocks so many times that its legs were bloody and scabbed. My Western sympathies got the better of me, and I asked Tao why someone didn’t remove the water buffalo’s blinders so he could see where he was going.

“Without blinders, he’d avoid the rocks,” Tao answered. “This is his punishment for what he did in a past life.”

I still find it hard to believe that Tao can have such backward beliefs, but then this whole evening is about educating peasants.

Another acrobatic exhibition follows the farming lesson, which improves