Flower Net (Red Princess 1)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She knelt before him. The silk of her kimono fell open, revealing the curve of her breasts. He pushed her away, stood, and crossed the room. He swung about, strode back to where she sat on the floor, grabbed her arms, and hauled her to her feet. The towel fell from her head and her hair hung in wet strings. His face was inches from hers as his voice grated, “Did you think I was so stupid that I wouldn’t figure it out?”

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

“Ever since I got here,” he said, “I relied on you and you pointed me in the wrong direction time and time again. You guided me away from what was important. Even when I heard things I didn’t listen. Remember that day at the Black Earth Inn? Remember how Nixon Chen and the others talked about you? How you were named for a model revolutionary, how you yourself were a model Red Guard, how, with your connections, you bought your way out of the commune and came to America? Was it all just an elaborate ploy, like what the Soviets did in the good old days—sending a kid to be raised in enemy territory so she’d grow up to make the best spy with the best cover and no accent?”

He pulled her up against his chest. He could feel her heart pounding against his. He lowered his voice to something almost sensual. “Remember how you left me, Hulan? Do you remember that? Did it mean anything to you?” Then he held her away from him again. “Remember in Los Angeles how I spilled my guts to you? I thought you would say something that would explain your past actions to me. But no! Why would you tell me the truth? Why would you tell me anything? And like an idiot, I didn’t press you.”

She struggled against him now, but he kept his grip. “So we come back to Beijing—your city. The whole time I’m depending on you for translation. Did you ever once tell me the truth of what was said? Even yesterday at the jail, did you really call Zai or was that just some performance? And every suggestion I made, every person I wanted to talk to, you steered me the other way. And your emotions!” A shiver ran through him. “On the back of the truck when you were mourning Peter. Was it an act like everything else?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “In fact, when I look back on it, you have kept the truth from me from the day we met. You never loved me. You always used me. You’re as corrupt, as foul, as revolting…”

He was cut off by her scream. She jerked away from him and fell back against the wall. Her hands clutched mindlessly at the silk that had fallen away from her body. Her face was lowered, but he could see her breath coming short and shallow. Finally, she looked up and met his eyes.

19

LATER

The Red Soil Farm

You want the truth?” she asked. “Where do I begin? With your questions? Yes, that money is mine. Yes, I am rich. I’m supposed to be rich. I’m a Red Princess. I’m from the special class—like Henglai, Bo Yun, Li Nan, and the rest of them.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not,” she said in resignation. After all these years, all that was left was the truth David had wanted for so long. “How can I make you understand? You talk about that day in the Black Earth Inn. Why didn’t you listen to Nixon and the rest of them? Why didn’t you pay attention to Peter’s stories of the real Liu Hulan? They told you so much about me that I was afraid down to my bones. But then I saw you didn’t, wouldn’t, hear it. I never told you things because the bitter truth is you never wanted to hear them. You think you hate me now? You just listen.”

Her hands twisted the kimono’s fabric. “As you know, I was named for Liu Hulan. But how do you emulate a model revolutionary when you are a Red Princess, when you are cushioned by wealth and privilege, when you are surrounded by love and creature comforts?”

She dropped the fabric and gestured to her New Year’s altar and the photos of her ancestors. “This house belonged to my mother’s family. They were imperial performers. I had great-great-aunts who were courtesans in the Forbidden City. This is common knowledge. But most people know little of my father’s family. They look at him and see a dedicated, hardworking man. But for generations the Lius were wealthy landowners. My great-grandfather was a magistrate here in the capital. Even after the fall of the Manchus, the Liu family, unlike my mother’s, kept their power. In fact, they got even richer.”

“I don’t care about them!” David exclaimed. “You’re just telling more stories to lead me away from the truth.”

Hulan didn’t seem to hear him. “My father, like his father before him, was a student of history,” she continued. “He looked at the world and ran away to join Mao. By the time Mao’s troops marched into Beijing in 1949, my father was twenty-four years old and a trusted confidant of the Supreme Leader. My parents were rewarded for their hard work and sacrifice. You know that saying, ‘Everybody works so everybody eats’? That was the essence of Mao’s communism, but from those very first days, some people ate better than others.”

Hulan’s memory drifted back to 1966, when she was eight years old. Mao and his wife had just launched the Cultural Revolution to rid the country of bourgeois forces. “My father took me to Tiananmen Square on August eighteenth to see the first official assembly of the Red Guards. One million of Beijing’s young people crammed together, wearing their parents’ old army uniforms, shouting slogans, singing, waving copies of the Little Red Book, and fainting when Mao stepped out on the Forbidden City’s walls to wave.

“Mao said we should oust the four olds—ideas, culture, customs, habits—and it was as though a hurricane hit the city. The whole country went crazy. People decided that red lights should mean go and green lights should mean stop. You could see accidents at almost every corner. For centuries, Chinese women had prided themselves on the length of their hair. But now the Red Guard tramped through the streets, stopped women at random, and chopped off their hair. They decided t

o rename everything—streets, people, schools, restaurants—to hong this, hong that, red this, red that. Old friends became Red Army or Red Peony, streets became Red Peace Way or Red Road. I kept my name, for I was Liu Hulan.”

“I want to know about the bankbooks,” he demanded. “I want to know how you’re connected to the Rising Phoenix.”

She ignored his outburst. “Anyone who was considered feudal, old, or foreign was persecuted,” she went on. “Doctors and artists were marched through the streets wearing dunce caps and placards outlining their defects. They were beaten, humiliated, thrown in jail. Managers in offices sat through struggle meetings where the workers accused them of being capitalist roaders, reactionaries, foreign spies, and renegades. Everywhere you went, people were spit on, bit, hit, lectured, humiliated, sent to work camps or jail for imagined crimes. Teachers were know-nothings. Students wrote dazibao, big character posters, criticizing their teachers as bourgeois, as backward, as running dogs of capitalism. Soon there were no more teachers, and by the end of the Cultural Revolution, seventy-seven million students had lost out on their educations.”

She stopped speaking as she relived the memories.

“The past has nothing to do with this, Hulan.”

“But it has everything to do with us. That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it?” She sighed deeply, then said, “I remember the night the Red Guard came to this neighborhood for the first time. I was ten years old, still too young to be in the Red Guard myself. They called all the neighbors into the street and selected Madame Zhang and her husband for criticism. I didn’t know much about Mr. Zhang, except that at New Year’s he always used to give me some good-luck money and a little candy and that he used to have tea with my father in the courtyard under the jujube tree. But the Red Guard knew a lot! They knew that Mr. Zhang was an intellectual, one of the very worst in the ‘stinking ninth category’ of people. We all stood there like sheep as the Red Guard plundered the Zhang home. They threw his books in a pile and set fire to them. They brought out the family’s ancestor scrolls and tossed them on the blaze.”

She wiped a hand across her eyes as if to erase the images.

“The whole time, they were screaming that Mr. Zhang was a monster, a cow, a snake demon. Pretty soon the neighbors were yelling, too. People were thinking, If I don’t play along, the Red Guard will come to my house tomorrow night. Someone shouted, ‘Zhang is never generous to us. He always hoards his good fortune.’ Our next-door neighbor cried out, ‘He reads too many books, but not anymore!’ His wife joined in next. ‘We condemn you and your wife forever!’ I can still see the way the orange light from the flames flickered across the faces of my neighbors. I remember the intense scowls of the Red Guard. How do I explain this? Their faces were twisted in exultation. I remember, too, Madame Zhang. We, her neighbors, had betrayed her.”

Hulan walked to the window and looked out on the courtyard. “I don’t know who dealt the first blow, but soon the Red Guards were beating old man Zhang. I can still see him lying on the ground, the clubs and sticks hitting his limp body. I can hear the chants of encouragement from our neighbors to ‘smash his dog head.’ And the look on Madame Zhang’s face when she realized that her husband was dead? I will take that to my grave.”

“But you had nothing to do with those things,” David said, still fighting his anger. “You were only a child.”

She turned to face him. “No, I was yelling with the rest of them.” She looked away again. “Let me tell you what happened in school. You already heard what the others told you. I called Teacher Zho a pig ass. I said so many things that soon Teacher Zho was crying. Imagine a man like that, educated, crying because of a ten-year-old! But I didn’t stop there. I didn’t stop until Teacher Zho went home and never came back.”