Flower Net (Red Princess 1)

“Liu Hulan, come and eat memories.”

“So many old friends here,” Nixon Chen allowed. “Right, Hulan?”

Hulan nodded.

Nixon turned to David. “We know Hulan since we are all of us children. Did you know that when we were at Phillips, MacKenzie? No?” Nixon laughed good-naturedly. “Well, you know it now!”

The first dishes began to arrive. David had been to plenty of Chinese restaurants, but he’d never seen a meal like this. On the table were placed primitively made ceramic bowls filled with pungent sauerkraut, steaming whole yams, beef tendon stew, and sorghum. Instead of rice, the waiter brought out corn bread and flat peasant loaves. The lazy Susan in the middle of the table spun as the group dipped their chopsticks family-style into the communal dishes.

“You want Peking duck, you go to Sick Duck, Big Duck, or Super Duck Restaurants! You want a meal like what we ate in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, you come to the Black Earth Inn. They give you all the food of those days. Do you remember, Hulan? How we used to talk all day, all night in the countryside about the special meals we would eat if we ever got home?”

“I remember you always talked about food.”

“And look at me today!” Nixon Chen laughed, patting his stomach. “Ten years ago, you never see someone fat like me in China. Today, I am a fat cat, no?” He beamed, pleased that his comment had different yet similar meanings in English and Chinese. “Today we eat our simple meal to bring back old memories. Tomorrow, we go to Laosanjie and order the Educated Youths Reunion Platter. You’ll like it, Hulan! It has all those delicacies we craved—shrimp, sea slug, squid, pineapple, bitter melon.”

“I’m sorry, Nixon, we are too busy,” Hulan said.

“On Sunday?” Nixon shook his head. “You should be taking David to the Great Wall or the Summer Palace, not making him work!” Nixon addressed David. “Liu Hulan never changes, no? I remember when she is a girl. She was always serious. Then we are sent to the countryside. Well, we didn’t all go. Some of us here were too young,” Nixon said, motioning to some of the others at the table. “But those who were old enough went to the countryside. Not to the same place! Some of us are sent to different provinces, some of us together. Some of us”—he gestured around the table—“we are crying. We are missing our families. We are missing school. We are even missing our teachers!”

“And we are thinking about all the bad things we said in those dark days,” interjected one woman. “The things we said against our own parents…”

David saw a shadow cross Hulan’s face.

Another man positione

d his mouth over his plate, spit out a piece of gristle, then asked the group, “Remember when we denounced our teachers as old farts?” He turned to Hulan. “Do you remember that day?” When she didn’t respond, he went on. “Mr. Stark, Hulan was only ten years old, but she was the bravest and most eloquent among us. She called Teacher Zho a pig ass. She said that his family was not red. She said he had come from the landlord class and that he lived in a honey jar. She said that to listen to him lecture was to betray our great Chairman. Her words were so strong.”

“I remember,” said another, “when we went to the commune. Was that two years later?”

“How can you forget?” asked Nixon. “It was 1970. We are sent to the Red Soil Farm. We thought the peasants were making a political statement with that name, but no. The earth was red and dry. For centuries they tried to make that earth yield a crop with no luck. Then they sent a bunch of city kids to ‘learn from the peasants.’”

The first woman shook her head at the memory. “We were only twelve years old then. We had struggle meetings every day. Always Liu Hulan stands tall. Always she is firm. She did not allow leniency. She did not forgive even the most minor transgression. You remember that?” the woman asked the table at large. A couple of people nodded appreciatively.

“Our Hulan is named for a famous revolutionary martyr,” said Nixon Chen. “But she never speaks of that Liu Hulan. No, she is the one who studies Lei Feng, a bigger hero. She memorizes all of his slogans and can quote his sayings to suit any situation.”

“Eeee, remember that time? We are all still together at the farm. In the last struggle meeting against our group leader, Liu Hulan stands up and speaks the words of Lei Feng. She holds up her arm just so.” The speaker raised his arm as if declaiming and continued in a voice filled with conviction. “‘Treat individualism as the cold autumn wind sweeps the fallen leaves.’ That put an end to our group leader’s capitalist-roader activities!”

Everyone except Hulan and David laughed at the recollection. Nixon Chen wiped tears from his eyes and said, “We also remember the day Mr. Zai comes to the collective. It is 1972 and your President Nixon has come to China, but we didn’t hear about things like that on the farm. We are fourteen years old and we have been away from our families for two years already. We have been working so hard—up before dawn, working in the fields all day, struggle meetings at night. We are brown from too much sun. We are dirty and tired and homesick. One day we are digging up stones from a field and we see a cloud of red dust coming toward us. Finally a big black car comes bumping across the dirt. It is Mr. Zai. We know him. He is from one of the old families. He takes Liu Hulan away. He says she is going to America to study. We are thinking…”

“We are thinking, Hulan, the reddest of us all, is going to America?” said a woman, whose hair, streaked with gray, was pinned into a severe knot at the back of her head. “We are thinking—and remember we are so lonely for home—Liu Hulan has the best guanxi of us all. Then we think, The Chairman must have some great plan. Hey, Mr. Chen, did you think we too would go to America a few years later?” The woman picked up a toothpick, then, in the traditional Chinese style, covered her mouth with one hand and went at her teeth with the other.

“No, Madame Yee, I think we are going to die in those fields…”

“Madame Yee?” David asked.

The woman in question laughed, pulling the toothpick from her mouth and wiped a morsel of food on the edge of her plate. “I didn’t think you recognized me. It’s been a long time.”

Nixon Chen looked at David with feigned surprise. “You don’t know who we are? Everyone here was an associate at Phillips, MacKenzie & Stout.”

David searched the faces and suddenly began to recognize old friends, but many of them were still strangers—people who must have come to the law firm after he left.

“There are more of us in Beijing, you know,” said Nixon. “Whoever can come for lunch comes. Some Saturdays we have as many as thirty attorneys.”

“You were in the countryside together and at the law firm?” David asked incredulously.

“China, despite our millions, is a small world. It is an even smaller world for the privileged, right, Hulan?”

She didn’t answer.