The Long March Home Read online

  ALSO BY ZOË S. ROY

  Butterfly Tears

  ZOË S. ROY

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  Toronto, Canada

  Copyright © 2011 Zoë S. Roy

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council

  for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  We are also grateful for the support received

  from an Anonymous Fund at The Calgary Foundation.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  Interior design: Luciana Ricciutelli

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Roy, Zoë S., 1953-

  The long march home : a novel / Zoë S. Roy.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  ISBN 978-1-926708-27-0

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8635.O94L66 2011 C813’.6 C2011-905664-X

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.yorku.ca/inanna

  CONTENTS

  1. NATURE’S COURSE

  2. DRIED DATE SOUP AND LONGAN NUTS

  3. WORKERS’ PROPAGANDA TEAM

  4. IDEOLOGICAL REFORM

  5. DISCARDED NAPA LEAVES

  6. LETTER FROM BURMA

  7. AMERICAN MONGREL

  8. WILDCAT VALLEY

  9. ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY SLOGAN

  10. SECRET HIDEOUT

  11. THE READING ROOM

  12. MULBERRY LEAVES

  13. FAMILY ENTERPRISE

  14. EGG TREE

  15. 3,000 YUAN

  16. YUANMOU MAN

  17. A FOREIGN GRANDMOTHER

  18. SWEET POTATO CONGEE

  19. STONE FOREST

  20. LOGAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  21. KUNG FU MAN

  22. A SKELETON FOR CHRISTMAS

  23. UMBRELLA-SHAPED ELM

  24. THE RED LINE

  25. WHITE PAGODA STREET

  26. BUDDHA’S GLORY

  27. AN ENDLESS OCEAN APART

  28. THE LONG MARCH HOME

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To all those who suffered

  during the Cultural Revolution.

  1.

  NATURE’S COURSE

  I’M HAVING A BABY! Meihua Wei was hoping for a girl; she already had two sons. She was washing her feet in the basin and couldn’t wait to share this news with her husband, Lon, who had just come home for his monthly visit from the mine where he worked. After dinner, he had listened to the radio for a while and then climbed into bed. Now he was waiting for her to join him.

  She dried her feet and stood up, catching her reflection in the small mirror above the wash basin. Her hair was just starting to gray, but she was still in good shape she thought as she patted her face dry, letting her thick hair tumble down her back. She turned the light off and opened the mosquito net covering the bed. Climbing in, she curled up beside her husband. Her long brown hair fanned out as her head sank into the pillow. Lon’s hand lightly touched her face. In the dim light from the window, he noticed her wide open eyes as they swept over his face. Meihua reached for Lon’s hand and covered it with her own. “Feel here, Lon,” she said, guiding his hand onto her abdomen.

  His fingers gingerly touched and circled her navel. Then his palm rested there, the warmth from his hand spreading throughout her body. Hesitating, Lon asked, “A baby?”

  “Yes, a baby,” Meihua murmured. Then, haltingly, “Do you think we should keep it?”

  “I have always wanted a daughter,” sighed Lon. “Maybe this time we will have a girl.” He turned to his wife, tenderly stroking her cheeks. “I won’t be able to help you very much. I’m rarely home. I worry so much about you here alone.” He had been living in the Red Flag Gulag, a mining camp, for the past seven years.

  “Don’t worry. Yao can help me.”

  “Yes, she can, but—” Lon flapped his hand in the air and clenched it into a fist, trapping the mosquito buzzing annoyingly around them. Turning back to her, a hot breath rushed from his nose and he blurted out, “I’m an ex-convict. This stigma will ruin our children’s future. In fact, it already has.”

  Meihua knew her husband was referring to their eldest son, Dahai. He had recently been assigned to what could only be described as a mediocre high school rather than the much more prestigious Red Flag High School, a key school in the city. “His grades weren’t great,” Meihua said, her voice soft and soothing. Her fingers gently unclenched Lon’s fist and lightly caressed his thick-callused palm.

  “Liu, from work, told me his daughter couldn’t get permission to marry her boyfriend at the military research complex where he was assigned over a year ago,” Lon said. “You know why they mistrust her? Because of her father’s background. Liu’s an ex-prisoner like me.”

  A shiver ran through Lon’s body. Liu had disagreed with the Party’s Secretary and because of his outspoken complaints about the unfair treatment he had endured, he was labelled a political criminal and expelled from the Communist Party.

  Only once had Lon dared to voice a different opinion, but the consequences were the same: first, time in prison and then probation and rehabilitation at the mining camp. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign launched in 1958 by Chairman Mao to persecute intellectuals who dared to question the government’s actions or policies, each work unit was compelled to hunt and denounce at least one rightist who favoured freedom of speech and outspokenly disagreed with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. Lon was the one at his high school who had dared to suggest the Party Secretary should have a university degree.

  “Keep your hopes up, Lon,” Meihua said, feeling her husband’s fear. “Chairman Mao tells us not to judge a person by his family background.” She tried to make him feel better, but she couldn’t help but reflect on her own situation. She was an art instructor at Spring University in Kunming City, but was born and raised in America. Chairman Mao had been friendly to Edgar Snow, an American journalist, though he had called all American imperialists “Paper Tigers,” meaning they looked terrifying but were actually fragile, as if they were made of paper. But, Mao had also written an article praising the Canadian medical doctor, Norman Bethune. It gave her a measure of hope.

  Yet, like her husband, Meihua couldn’t help but worry about the future of her children. I’m not an American imperialist, she assured herself. Surely, no one would think so. My father was Chinese. And my children were born here. They are also Chinese.

  Lon exhaled in resignation. “I’m worried about Dahai’s future. I don’t want our children to go through what I have. And if we had a daughter, I would be even more worried. Maybe we shouldn’t keep it.”

  “I understand,” Meihua answered, hiding her disappointment, and rolling to face him. Lon was tall and lanky, his fine hair streaked with gray, his brow permanently furrowed with worry. Meihua was tiny and could curl h
er entire body into the crook of his arm. She snuggled into him and laid her head on his chest “Let’s talk about it tomorrow, okay?” she said, her hand running over the hardness of his abdomen. “Rest now.”

  Lon said nothing. He was lost in thought.

  Mosquitoes zizzed outside the net. Eventually Meihua fell asleep. In her dream, she watched a little girl in a bright red blouse and matching skirt, twirling on the green lawn. When Meihua embraced her, myriad pastel-coloured flower petals floated in the air around her.

  The following morning, Meihua woke at around 9:00 a.m. Lon was already up. She put on a blouse and a loose, lemon yellow skirt, even though in 1965 most Chinese women wore only dark shapeless pants with tunics made of the same coarse fabric. Wearing a skirt or a dress was the only habit she had not relinquished since coming to China in 1948, so some of her colleagues had nicknamed her Skirt Wei. As Meihua thought about the funny nickname, Jar Qian came to mind. She was not the only one with a nickname at the university. Professor Qian at the Department of Mathematics had obtained his degree from Université de Picardie Jules Verne in France. It was said he stashed his money in jars and never invited any of his colleagues to his apartment, fearing his jars would be discovered, and his money stolen. So people called him “Jar Qian.” Knowing this made her feel better about her own nickname, and her reluctance to restrict her wardrobe to shapeless gray pants and dark tunics.

  She slipped into her shoes, and smoothed her hair down as best she could. In the heat, it tended to curl, so she often rolled it into a tight bun on the back of her head, her attempt to hide stray curls from curious eyes. Lon was home though, so today, she wore it long and loose around her shoulders, its waves hugging her cheeks. She opened the bedroom door and stepped in the living room. “I’m up,” she announced to no one in particular, scanning the apartment for Lon, but he was nowhere to be found.

  A familiar voice startled her. “He’s gone back to Huize County,” said Yao, who had just come out of the boys’ bedroom, a cotton bed pad bundled in her arms. Yao, a woman in her late forties, worked for Meihua and Lon, helping with the kids and the household chores. She was a round woman, of stocky build, with long gray hair that she wore in a loose braid down her back. Her eyes were dark brown, always guarded, but warm and inviting around those she loved. She had been with the family for fifteen years.

  “Why?” Meihua exclaimed. “What happened?”

  “A telephone message came from the switchboard. The leaders at the mine wanted him to go back right away,” said Yao, pointing with her chin at the small table by the door. “He left a note for you over there.”

  Pulling a slip of paper from underneath a glass paperweight, Meihua deciphered the scrawl: “Meihua, there was a mining accident yesterday. I must return for the rescue effort. Many people are still buried underground … keep the baby if you wish. We must let nature take its course and accept its gifts. Lon”

  Although overjoyed at Lon’s sudden change of heart, Meihua was worried about his rescue mission. She envisioned the search team in the rubble, hour after hour, choking and coughing; their breathing passages filling with dark dust and pungent odours. Images of the mine caving or poisoning methane gas creeping into their nostrils, or another explosion filled her with fear.

  Yao’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “There’s hot soymilk in the thermos,” she said, having returned from laying the cotton pad out on a chair in the sun—her monthly chore to drive the dampness away. “I’ll fry a steamed bun for your breakfast. Okay?”

  “No need,” Meihua said, heading for the wooden stand near the wall. The two-tier stand had a rack on the top for hanging face towels, an lower shelf to hold an enamel face basin and and another shelf below that one for a foot pan. She poured hot water from a thermos into the basin to wash herself from the neck up. Then she brushed her teeth. She liked to have some privacy, unlike other residents who brushed their teeth at the communal sinks.

  “Can you boil some water for Teacher Yu? She’s been sick these past few days,” Meihua asked Yao, washing down some crackers with her morning cup of soymilk.

  “I’ll get some drinking water for her from the boiler at the canteen. Our ration of coal has almost run out.”

  “Thank you,” Meihua said and then retreated to her room. She planned to work on her teaching materials before heading out to attend that Saturday afternoon’s routine session of political studies. She pushed open the double-paned window and hooked the ring screws, so the wind could not blow the window shut. But she kept the light curtains drawn to maintain a bit of privacy from the windows on the adjacent building that faced hers. Sunlight, together with the scent of soymilk and fried buns, filtered through the gap between the curtain and window frame.

  After opening the files on her desk and selecting a number of books from the shelf next to her, Meihua began to prepare her courses: “World History of Painting” and “Creative Paintings.” Sometimes it was difficult to prepare for her classes because the lesson plans had to include artists and historical events based on the curriculum demanded by Marxism-Leninism. For example, artwork about the “Paris Commune” represented revolution and Picasso’s “Guernica” condemned wars. The “Mona Lisa” had to be criticized as it was said her smile would corrupt revolutionaries. Everything that Meihua had learned seventeen years earlier at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia was not deemed appropriate in China now, and Meihua had trouble locating recent publications in English that would fit the necessary curriculum. Instead, Meihua opted for Chinese versions of the Russian communist textbooks used at other universities.

  Teaching art was easier. She taught painting techniques that had no political implications. She even used live models in her third-year art class, without caring whether or not others would gossip about it. Critics were more interested in comparing themes of artwork or artists’ ideology. Paintings about the revolution and the working class like Nikolai Nikolaevich Baskakov’s “Lenin in Kremlin,” and Boris Grigoriev’s “The People’s Land” and “Village,” were greatly admired. Meanwhile paintings that had been labelled “bourgeois,” like Claude Monet’s “Women in the Garden,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith,” and Eleuterio Pagliani’s “A Reclining Lady with a Fan,” were simply ignored. Meihua liked to emphasize attention to detail and colour in her art classes, and avoided encouraging her students to create artwork dealing with revolutionary themes, like the paintings “On the Banks of the Yan River,” and “Liu Hulan.” Instead, she focused on guiding her students to practice mixing colours and brushwork techniques.

  As she mulled over the teaching materials, a print that had been distributed among all the teachers caught her eye. The Party’s Secretary wanted them to follow Mao and the Communist Party’s political viewpoints against the U.S. On the print, painted in bright red, were the words: “American Imperialists Should Get Out of South Korea!” Her heart sank. Meihua was born in America.

  At noon, a pot of boiled rice, two dishes of pork and cabbage, and three bowls sat ready on the table. The door popped open, and Sang, Meihua’s seven-year-old son, bounced into the room. He was lanky like his father, his hair also fine and dark. “Mama, please help me take off my book bag.” His hand gripped the straps, as he struggled to pull them over his head.

  “Okay, hold on a moment, Sang,” Meihua said, helping to slip the pack from her son’s shoulders.

  At the same time, Yao pushed the door open with her ample hips, and placed two thermoses on the table, next to the bowls. She told Meihua the blue thermos was for Teacher Yu.

  Sang’s eyes were shining and darting around the room. “Where’s Baba?”

  “He had to go back to work because there was an accident at the mine.”

  “No!” Sang whined. “He promised to take me to the Golden Palace tomorrow.”

  “Baba will take you to the palace another time,” Meihua said gently. �
�Why don’t you play with the toy bus he made for you?” She filled one of the bowls with the rice, topped it with some pork and cabbage, and placed it in front of him. “Eat your lunch, please, little boy. Then tell me what your plans are for this afternoon.”

  “All students are supposed to do good deeds at home,” Sang recited, his legs dangling from the chair beneath the table. He told his mother that his teacher had asked the students to learn from the People’s Liberation Army martyr, Lei Feng, and find ways to help others. “What things should I do to help?” he asked.

  “You can help Yao,” answered Meihua just as Yao returned. Meihua gestured for Yao to sit down. “Time for lunch, Yao. We’re waiting for you.”

  “I’m coming,” replied Yao, drying her hands on her apron, then pulling a stool up to the table. She sat down and picked up her bowl, and filled it with some rice. “At the boiler, I met Sang’s teacher. She said there would be no extra activities this afternoon.”

  “I told Mommy first. I win!” Sang clapped his hands and the chopsticks he’d been holding dropped to the floor.

  “My dear Sang, don’t move.” Yao bent over to pick up the chopsticks and tossed them into an empty pot. Then she handed Sang another pair. “Little one, be still. You are moving around too much.”

  “I’m not little.” Sang took the chopsticks, wagging his head left and right. “I’m an elementary student.”

  “Okay, student Sang. Please discipline yourself and eat properly,” said Meihua, her voice playfully stern.

  “Yes, sir!” Sang straightened his back, casting Yao a sly glance. “Mommy’s really like a teacher,” he whisphered.

  The adults both laughed.

  “Your mama is a teacher,” Yao chuckled. “She teaches big students,” she added, and then slid a fried egg from a plate into his bowl. “Eat well,” she said, pushing Sang’s stool closer to the edge of the table.

  After lunch, Yao cleared the table and stacked all the bowls and plates into the pot that also served as a wash pan.