The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [112]
“It is dangerous.”
Well, we wouldn’t want to do anything dangerous all of a sudden, would we?
“Where, then?” It was a rhetorical question, because Neal Carey wasn’t following her anywhere.
“Perhaps your room?”
Except maybe there.
18
She sat on the bed. He closed the bamboo shades and turned the lamp down low. There was no lock on the door, so he set the chair against it and sat down. She closed her hands in front of her and looked at the floor.
He wanted to get up and hold her, but he couldn’t seem to move. He felt like he was living inside a marble statue.
“So talk,” he said.
“You are angry.”
“Goddamn right I’m angry,” he hissed. “Do you know what it was like in that shithole in the Walled City?!”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “You are well now?”
“Terrific.”
“Good.”
Yeah, good. Except I don’t know if I want to kill you or love you. Get out of here or stay here with you.
“So what’s your story?” he asked.
Li Lan
My mother’s family were rich landowners in Hunan Province, very important members of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang.
Mother grew up in privileged household, cultured … genteel. Her parents were very progressive. They believed that boys and girls should be equal. And they thought that China must become modernized. So they sent their oldest son to England, the youngest son to France, and the middle daughter to America. Middle Daughter was my mother. So as a young girl, just seventeen, she traveled to America, to Smith College.
But she did not stay very long. The Japanese invaded and killed very many Chinese. Mother came home. Her father was very angry with her, very worried. But Mother was patriotic. She ran away to join the fight.
She became a legend. She ran far away from Hunan, north to the area controlled by communist guerrillas. She trained hard in the mountains. She learned to shoot a rifle, to plant a mine, to make a deadly spear from a bamboo stick. Her officers also gave her political indoctrination, and she became a devoted communist. She learned how her own family’s huge landholdings oppressed the masses, and she longed to purge the burning shame of her class background. She became at first a courier, and then a spy. It was a role in which her family background and her education was useful. She spoke beautiful Chinese, and she could understand Japanese and English. Mother could walk among any kind of people and keep her ears open.
Her work was dangerous and she loved it. Every dangerous act was a redemption, every contribution to the war helped to build a new woman in a new China. And she fell in love.
He was a soldier, of course. A guerrilla leader and a brilliant political officer. She met Xao in the mountains when she smuggled a message from an enemy held in a town nearby. He admired first her courage, then her beauty, and then her mind. They went to bed that night. It was her first time, and it was all somehow the same thing: the war, the communist struggle, and Xao Xiyang. She knew their futures would always be together, hers, Xao’s and China’s. The war was long, so long, and after they defeated the Japanese, they began to struggle against the fascist Kuomintang and its leader, Chiang Kai-shek.
In the battle to liberate the country from the Kuomintang, my mother’s background became even more useful. She pretended to become obedient to her father. She went home, she attended parties, she “dated” American officers and spies. All this time she passed information to the Party, many times through her husband, Xao. When the communist forces appeared to be victorious, her family fled to Taiwan, but Mother hid, and stayed behind. She traveled to Beijing and found Father there! They were together on the birthday of the new China. Many times Mother told us the story of how she and Father stood in Tiananmen Square, with thousands of red flags waving in the wind and thousands of people in the square, how they stood there cheering Chairman Mao and weeping with joy as the Chairman declared the People’s Republic of China. Father stayed with the Party and was assigned a government