How can she when her feet have been broken and crushed, held together in their tiny shape for more than forty years? But an order is an order, and the crowd is raw with hatred. Yong wobbles to her feet. Her face remains stoic, but her body sways uncertainly. Ta-ming moves to help her, but Kumei wisely holds him back. As the brigade leader said, the boy is and will always be a black element. How he acts now will save him from harassment in the future.
“Walk!” Brigade Leader Lai shouts. When Yong doesn’t move, he yells even louder. “Walk!”
I’m horrified, terrified, and thrust to that place I never want to visit—what happened to my father and my part in his death. The nausea I’ve been feeling the last few days comes up and burns the back of my throat. I feel sure I’m going to faint.
“Walk!” Red fury infuses the brigade leader’s face. “And tomorrow you will join the other comrades in the fields. It’s planting time, and we need all hands … and feet.”
Is he joking? Yong can’t possibly work in the fields. She wouldn’t last an hour, let alone a day.
“Walk!” he bellows. “Walk all the way back to your villa!”
The crowd takes up the chant. “Walk, walk, walk.”
This is much worse than when Comrade Ping-li’s husband was struggled against because his wife killed herself by throwing herself in front of the hay cutter. I willingly joined in when the mob attacked him, but Yong, Kumei, and Ta-ming are my friends. They didn’t do anything wrong. And maybe, I’m shocked to think now, Ping-li’s husband didn’t either.
Kumei and Ta-ming are permitted to help Yong down the platform’s steps, then they move aside so she can proceed on her own. The crowd parts to let her pass. Tears roll down her cheeks, but she refuses to cry out. I look everywhere, trying to find Tao, but I’ve gotten separated from him and his family. I need him. Where is he? I try to calculate how far it is to the villa. Yong will have to walk on the footpath next to the stream, past the turnoff to the Charity Pavilion, and then continue to the villa. I can make that trip in about ten minutes, but I don’t see how Yong will be able to do it at all.
The people from the other villages that make up the commune begin to disperse to spend the rest of their Sunday in peace with their own families, but the villagers from Green Dragon stay close to Yong, taunting her, spitting on her. I see Tao and grab his arm. He shakes me off as he turns to me. His face is filled with rage and hate. How could I have married him?
I push past a few more people. Up ahead, Yong staggers. When I reach Brigade Leader Lai, Party Secretary Feng Jin, and Sung-ling, I plead with them to end this, but they continue their chants. “Walk! Walk! Walk!” Their faces are as twisted and frenzied as my husband’s. An image of my mother comes to my mind. It was on the day the FBI and INS agents accused my father of so many terrible things. My mother showed no fear. She was Dragon strong. The realization that truth, forgiveness, and goodness are more important than revenge, condemnation, and cruelty gives me courage and certainty. I’m dizzy and sick to my stomach, but I straighten my back, walk forward, and take Yong’s arm. Seeing what I’ve done, Kumei takes Yong’s other arm. Epithets are hurled our way. I recognize the voices of my husband, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters. Finally, I give in fully to what I’ve known for months now. I don’t belong here. As soon as this is over, I’ll go home, tear up the letter I wrote to my mother earlier today, and write a new one, asking her to come and get me. I want to go home to Los Angeles. If I can’t go all the way home, then at least I can be with her in Shanghai.
Kumei and I help Yong over the villa’s raised stone threshold and into the first courtyard. I fear the villagers will follow us, but they don’t. They stay outside, still chanting. We pull Yong through the courtyards and corridors to the kitchen, where she collapses on the ground. I’m going to be sick and I look around frantically, trying to find a bowl or pot, but all those have been given either to the canteen or to the blast furnace. Usually there’s a washbasin on the floor, but it isn’t here today. In desperation, I run to the low wall that divides the kitchen and the stall where this family once kept their pigs. I lean my head over it and throw up. Once my stomach is empty, I sink to the floor, turn, and look at the others. Yong is white with pain, Kumei looks terrified, and Ta-ming shivers from shock.
“Why?” I manage to ask.
“Food,” Kumei answers weakly, leaving me even more confused. “We needed food. We’re black elements, so I knew we’d receive less food when rationing began. We live in the villa with the brigade leader. He
brought home extra food, but there’s been a price.”
“You’ve been …” I glance at Ta-ming, not sure how blunt I can be.
“It’s a price I’ve paid before,” Kumei says. “It’s not as bad as you think, but last night the brigade leader and I had a disagreement. I needed to take care of Ta-ming, but the brigade leader wanted me to take care of him.”
I close my eyes. Of course, this had to be true. The brigade leader didn’t need to live in the villa when he already had the leadership hall—the most secure and comfortable building in the commune. I lived in the villa with Brigade Leader Lai only a few days after I returned to Green Dragon and before I married Tao, but I remember my mother complaining a couple of times about how she kept getting woken up at night by the sound of someone creeping around. That must have been the brigade leader going to and from Kumei’s room, or vice versa. There are no secrets in China, not even in a house this large, but why hadn’t I understood what was going on before? Because I’m an idiot.
“Have you eaten?” Yong says, her voice barely a whisper. “Do you drink tea?”
These are the two most common questions asked when a guest enters your home. Even in her agony, Yong is a woman far above the barbarians outside the villa’s walls.
Kumei, remembering she is also a hostess, gets to her feet and puts water on for tea.
LATER, AFTER THE peasants leave, I fetch water from the stream. The cold water will help sooth Yong’s feet, which are about the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. Her toes and midfeet have been broken and rolled over until the toes meet the heels. They’ve been wrapped in that position for decades. Now they’ve uncoiled, but only so far. They look like camelback bridges—just the toes and backs of the heels touch the ground. The cadres made her walk barefoot, so her flesh, which looks baby soft from being hidden from the world all these years, is ripped and torn. The color? It does not belong on a living creature. I’m trying to be brave and helpful, but my stomach churns. I wish whatever it was I ate or drank would hurry up and pass through me, just as it did when I first arrived here with Z.G.
I’ve had questions about Yong and Kumei for a long time. In the past, I made up romantic stories, for Kumei especially. Now that I’ve helped them in front of everyone, I suppose I’ll have a black mark against me too. Since that’s the case, I need to know what they did to earn such antipathy from everyone in the commune.
“Why do they hate you so?” I ask.
That’s about as direct and American as I can make it. I expect them to shrink from my rudeness, but instead they look at me as if I’m stupid.
“My master was the landowner,” Yong answers, fingering the white ribbon she’ll wear as a stigma for the rest of her life. “Didn’t you know that?”
“I did, but I still don’t understand what they have against you.”
“Because we’re all that’s left of his household,” Kumei says. “The people think we lived privileged lives, but he was a bad man and we had to endure a lot—”
“I know you feel that way,” Yong interrupts. “But I thought he was a good man. He cared for the people here. When the Eighth Route Army came and the soldiers asked him to redistribute his land, he did so without argument.”
“I never even heard the word landowner before the army came,” Kumei says.