Bury What We Cannot Take: A novel Page 2

  Comrade Ang beckoned him close. “I’ve been watching you these past weeks.”

  Ah Liam swallowed hard.

  “You consistently make thoughtful and interesting points that demonstrate your commitment to the Party.”

  Ah Liam relaxed. “Thank you, Comrade, for your encouragement.”

  “Now,” Comrade Ang said, “your family background is problematic, to say the least, but it’s clear you’re able to think for yourself.”

  Ah Liam felt his cheeks color. His classmates were from well-off families, but only he had a father who was an Overseas Chinese in Hong Kong; only he lived in Diamond Villa at the very top of Tranquil Seas Road, although the bottom two stories had been requisitioned by the Party and leased to tenants, the servants’ quarters converted into the People’s Maternity Clinic.

  Ah Liam wasn’t sure if he should thank the discussion leader for the backhanded compliment, or apologize for his family. Before he could decide which, Comrade Ang reached into a desk drawer and withdrew a sheet of paper, pale yellow and tissue thin.

  Ah Liam’s breath caught in his throat. It was an application for the Youth League.

  “I don’t hand this out lightly,” Comrade Ang said. “You know as well as I that joining the Youth League is the first step toward full Party membership.”

  Ah Liam nodded, unable to speak. He’d coveted that gold pin ever since he’d seen a team of tall, strapping boys from the senior middle school sweeping the streets by the marketplace while they sang “Red May” in robust baritones. Standing before the boys, Ah Liam had taken in the appreciative, admiring faces of the passing townsfolk—all except for his mother, who, in her typically bourgeois way, yanked his arm, saying, “What a waste of time. Don’t they have sweepers for that?”

  Comrade Ang handed over the sheet of paper. “Turn this in as soon as you can.”

  Ah Liam took the long route home, grateful that, for once, San San wasn’t tagging along. With the whole family crammed into the top floor of the villa, along with the servants, he never had a moment to himself. But he knew it was wrong to complain, even if only in his head, when everything his family had amassed had been at the expense of the proletariat. Now that his uncles and aunts and cousins had left for Taiwan and the Philippines, it was only fair that all those spare rooms be returned to the people.

  At the intersection, instead of turning homeward, he continued onto Eternal Peace Road, which led to the edge of Drum Wave Islet, away from the din of town. Years earlier, on his very first day of school, Ah Liam had learned that in ancient times, large hollow rocks had lined the stretch of craggy coastline down below. When high tides pounded the rocks, ghostly drumbeats soared through the air, frightening the early settlers who would give the tiny two-square-kilometer islet its name. Of course, the reef had long since disintegrated, which encapsulated all Ah Liam hated about being a child. Everything magical and exciting seemed to have happened in the past, before he was born, or would happen in the future, after he was an adult. Nothing ever seemed to happen now. Leaning over as far as he could without losing his balance, he watched the waves lap at the shore like the tongues of kittens. Playful, harmless, meek.

  A few hundred meters away, across the channel, the dense, towering buildings of the city of Xiamen glittered beneath the late-afternoon sun. At that very moment, he imagined brand-new, multilevel dormitories rising into the sky, railroads unfolding across the land, swarms of people in buses and on bicycles hurrying to wherever they needed to go to play their roles in the construction of new China. Motor vehicles weren’t even permitted on sleepy Drum Wave Islet. Teams of laborers lugged wooden carts up steep lanes, as though stuck in an earlier time. Ah Liam’s best bet was to keep up his marks, qualify for the Youth League, and earn a place in Xiamen University. Then, finally, could he cross the channel and join in on the action.

  He wondered if Comrade Ang had invited others to apply for the Youth League, or if he and Ping Ping would be their class’s sole members. A smattering of raindrops tapped the crown of his head, and he peered into the sunlit sky. A knot of dark clouds gathered in the east, prompting him to hurry home and shut himself in his room with his application.

  Ah Liam was an exemplary student: class monitor three years in a row, top marks in math and science, captain of the football team. Still, his application had to make up for his family’s former wealth, his father’s job, and even his mother’s missionary-school education.

  Pen poised over paper, Ah Liam let himself imagine what would happen if the Party learned of his grandmother’s crime. His family was already under surveillance. Inspectors were routinely dispatched to the villa—neighbors and friends of his mother who questioned them about Pa’s work in Hong Kong and when he would return to help rebuild the Fatherland. The inspectors were friendly, even apologetic, and Ah Liam didn’t believe his family to be in serious trouble. No doubt his confession would change that, but perhaps he’d been wrong to hide what Grandma had done. Perhaps a little fear was precisely the push she needed to leave the past behind and change her ways, for how would she learn her lesson if she faced no punishment?

  Five years earlier, when Ah Liam’s last two cousins had moved away, he’d begged his mother to let him go with them, but of course she’d said no. Loneliness and boredom drove him to befriend the son of the assistant cook. The boy was a full head taller than he, and whenever they teamed up to play football against Ah Liam’s neighborhood friends, they always won.

  One day, while Ah Liam and his new friend were practicing drills in the courtyard, Grandma summoned him inside. “That boy should be helping out in the kitchen, but he can’t if he spends all his time playing with you.”

  The injustice of it all crashed down on Ah Liam. His friend was also eight years old. Why didn’t he go to school? Why did he wear Ah Liam’s old clothes that were clearly too small for him? Why should he have to work in the kitchen with the adults?

  Grandma’s eyes lengthened into slits. “Because that’s his fate,” she said, “just as it is your fate to study hard so you can follow in the footsteps of your grandfather and father and bring prosperity to the family.”

  Everything Ah Liam had learned at school fell into place. He’d finally understood why the Chairman had declared, “Communism is a hammer that we use to crush the enemy.” Suddenly Ah Liam saw the enemy all around him. It was the enemy who barred the servants from entering through the villa’s front door, and reduced men to beggars who slunk around the marketplace back before the Party had rounded them up for rehabilitation, and caused his classmates to make fun of Pimple Face, his seatmate, whose mother was a widow and whose uniform was threadbare and ill fitting. Ah Liam knew he should take a hammer to his grandmother’s callousness, but at that moment, he didn’t dare. Instead, he let a few days pass and then returned to playing in the courtyard with his friend. Shortly after that, Grandma fired his friend’s mother. She claimed the cook was no longer needed now that so few of the family remained. Ah Liam had cried and raged and kicked his bedroom door hard enough to crack the wood, but of course that changed nothing. Watching from his bedroom window as his friend and the assistant cook straggled down the street with meager knapsacks on their backs, Ah Liam vowed never again to stay silent in the face of the enemy.

  Since then, his baser instincts—wasn’t that Ping Ping’s sophisticated term?—had wiped out the memory of that vow, driving him to swear himself and his sister to secrecy about what Grandma had done. Now, however, this application presented an opportunity to reaffirm his dedication to the Party and make things right.

  He lowered his pen and a stillness settled over him: the acceptance that what he was about to do could never be undone. He wrote, Chairman Mao teaches that those who confess will be treated less harshly than those who refuse to admit their wrongdoings. He went on to detail the horrific manner in which his grandmother had insulted the Great Helmsman, and why he had no choice but to expose her crime.

  He didn’t stop writing until he’d
completed the entire application. When he finally raised his head, his hand and forearm ached. He was dizzy and famished. He walked through the dining room to the kitchen, where the sight of his grandmother made him freeze. He hadn’t expected her to be up and about.

  Leaning on her cane to shift the weight off her bound feet, she stabbed a finger in the pot on the stove and brought it to her lips. “No taste,” she said. “Add more vinegar, more soy sauce, more everything!” This was his grandmother’s refrain. Ma said her taste buds had grown numb with old age.

  Grandma turned to Ah Liam. “I saved you the éclair,” she said, pointing to the dining room.

  Ah Liam made himself say, “I’m not hungry.”

  “If you say so,” Grandma said, returning her attention to Cook.

  Ah Liam went back to his desk and reread his application. Perhaps this line was too dismissive, that one too harsh. Perhaps he could tell Comrade Ang that he’d accidentally dropped his application in the spring by his house and request a fresh one.

  From the kitchen, Grandma’s strident voice rose. “Are you deaf? I said more vinegar! More!”

  Did she have to scold Cook, a man with more white hairs on his head than black, as though he were a naughty child? If Ah Liam didn’t hammer the enemy now, who knew what other crimes his grandmother would go on to commit. He smoothed the application between the pages of an exercise book so it wouldn’t get rumpled in his satchel. Closing his eyes, he pictured himself with his fellow Youth League members on National Day. Arranged from shortest to tallest, they would parade through the town center in pairs, waving their red flags high in the air and singing “March of the Volunteers.” The townsfolk lining the road beamed at them with pride and affection. The gold pins on their breastbones glinted in the sunlight. He and Ping Ping were almost the same height; there was a good chance they’d get paired together.

  3

  These days, Bee Kim rarely had reason to leave the villa, but someone had to sort through Hua’s belongings and gather up the things her daughters might want before the servants made off with them all.

  For much of the morning, while Bee Kim separated Hua’s good jewelry from the eye-catching but worthless trinkets, she kept her tears in check. In fact, she was too angry to cry. Fury, pure and white-hot, had driven Bee Kim to hammer the portrait of that damned megalomaniac who’d made Hua suffer. Who’d made all of them suffer.

  Four years earlier, the Party had seized the last factory, and her Ah Lip had gone from boss to janitor in a matter of weeks. He’d died of a heart attack shortly after. None of Bee Kim’s sons returned home from abroad for fear not only of getting trapped, but also of being made to pay for their father’s so-called crimes. She locked herself in her room and refused all visitors, especially Hua.

  Now, of course, she regretted those months she’d spent resenting her closest friend. But back then, no one would have blamed her. Hua’s Thomas had been one of the lucky ones. His had been designated a “showcase factory,” through which the Party toured Western visitors to demonstrate the harmonious collaboration that had blossomed between capitalists and communists. Yes, they levied outrageous taxes that threatened to bankrupt him; yes, they planted a Party secretary in the office next door, which essentially reduced Thomas to a figurehead. But at least he wasn’t despised and humiliated by his own workers. For the most part, Thomas and Hua held on to their old lives, with a few opulent Party banquets thrown in, and Bee Kim hated them for it.

  With time, however, she saw how fortunate her Ah Lip was to have passed when he did. Earlier this year, the Party decided Thomas was no longer useful to them and turned on him, and his employees followed suit. Gray-haired men who’d worked at the factory since they’d first traded their shorts for long pants imprisoned Thomas in his own office. Every afternoon for two weeks straight, Bee Kim accompanied Hua to the factory in Xiamen with tins of soup and noodles and those flaky red bean pastries Thomas loved. The apologetic guard always turned them away.

  The last time they showed up at the gate, the guard wouldn’t meet Hua’s gaze. Hua gripped the young man’s brawny forearm until her knuckles whitened. “What’s happened to Thomas?” He stared at his shoes as he spoke. “Boss left us this morning.” Hua’s sack crashed to the ground. She fell against the gate, pounding the steel bars and wailing. Bee Kim had to enlist the trishaw driver to help drag her friend away.

  In the months following Thomas’s death, Hua cancelled their biweekly lunch dates. When Bee Kim showed up unannounced at Hua’s house on the pretext of wanting to drop off a poetry collection she thought she’d like, she found the servants crowded around a heap of Hua’s favorite garments. One of them whispered that Madame had sworn off bright colors and had resigned herself to a widow’s wardrobe of drab beige for the rest of her days. Letters from Hua’s daughters in America arrived at Diamond Villa, begging Bee Kim for news of their mother. She advised them to give Hua time. After all, that was what Bee Kim had needed after she’d lost Ah Lip. Needless to say, she’d never expected Hua to down that fatal dose of sleeping pills.

  “You could have come and lived with me,” Bee Kim said aloud to the empty room. “We would have been all right together.”

  She folded Hua’s mink stoles and muffs into a small suitcase for the American daughters and ran her fingers across the shelves, bare except for an old bag of fabric scraps. She tossed the bag in the junk pile for the servants to pick through, and as the bag sailed through the air, a square of floral silk drifted out. She held the small blue-and-yellow square to the light. She touched the cool silk to her cheek, inhaling its musty scent.

  Bee Kim had been married for less than a month when her tyrannical mother-in-law ordered her to mend an armful of dresses, even though there were plenty of house girls up to the task. Determined to prove herself, she worked through the night by candlelight, only to discover in the morning that she’d pricked her finger with the needle and bled across the bodice of the old woman’s favorite dress. Bee Kim ran to Hua in a panic, certain the old woman would make good on her threat to send her back to her parents in disgrace. But Hua was a gifted seamstress. She managed to hunt down a bolt of the same blue-and-yellow floral silk, and together, she and Bee Kim set about sewing an entire new dress. The next time the old woman asked a house girl to bring her the dress, the copy was hanging in her wardrobe, and when the frog closures gaped, she lamented she’d gained weight.

  Bee Kim dropped the fabric square in the bag of scraps and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief, for what would Hua’s servants think if they found her in this state?

  Bee Kim was settling down for a nap before dinner when she heard a knock on the front door. Her daughter-in-law’s residents association meeting had gone long again, so she’d have to see who it was.

  The children had answered the door, and a pair of women clad in the cadre’s drab uniform of dark-gray tunic and trousers peered in. Bee Kim recognized them both. The tall one, with the long face and large teeth of a horse, lived in the row of smaller houses two streets over. The short, plump one was married to a good-for-nothing gambler who had grown up with Bee Kim’s sons. The women would have been well aware that Seok Koon was at her meeting, so perhaps they’d planned to avoid her. Perhaps they’d come hoping to intimidate an old woman while she was all alone.

  Ah Liam said, “I told them my ma was out.”

  The boy’s grave expression made Bee Kim loosen her grip on her cane. Though small for twelve, he tried so hard to embody his role as man of the house. She smiled at him and said, “But of course these comrade aunties already knew that.”

  The cadres pretended not to hear this.

  The horsey one bared her oversized teeth. “We’re sorry to barge in like this, Mrs. Ong.”

  “Yes, please pardon the intrusion, Mrs. Ong,” said the plump one.

  Bee Kim frowned to make clear the imposition. “It’s no trouble at all.”

  No one knew of the wrecked portrait except for Seok Koon, so what had brought these wome
n here? Had Mui Ah been spying on them? The house girl had the sly aura of a fox fairy; Bee Kim had never trusted her.

  She waited for the cadres to comment on how tall the children had grown, or on the People’s Daily’s latest reports about the “Let a hundred flowers bloom” campaign. Inspections always began with small talk, as though the cadres had just dropped by for a chat.

  This time, however, the horsey one hung her head and said, “This is a little embarrassing, but might we talk in private?” She gave Bee Kim a meaningful look.

  So that was it. Mui Ah had betrayed her. Bee Kim willed herself to stay calm. “Of course. We’ll have more privacy in the study.”

  She pulled back the sliding door and led the cadres into the room, never glancing at the new, pristine portrait hanging in the center of the wall. The cadres each took a stool around the marble-topped table, and the horsey one looked over at Ah Liam and San San, lingering in the doorway. “It would be better to talk without the children.”

  Bee Kim slowly lowered herself into her rocking chair, wincing as her anklebones cracked. “San San, don’t you have a piano lesson tomorrow? Shouldn’t you be practicing?”

  Her granddaughter’s disappointment was plain, but she trudged off without protest. Ah Liam turned to follow her, and Bee Kim said, “Grandson, you may stay.”

  Ah Liam’s eyebrows shot up. The cadres frowned at each other.

  Bee Kim directed him to the stool closest to her. “I’m an old lady who is a bit hard of hearing,” she explained. “I need him here.”

  The boy stared down at his lap, refusing to meet Bee Kim’s smile. Lately, she’d watched him pore over the propaganda in the papers; she’d overheard him quoting the Chairman to his sister. It would be good for him to see his beloved Party in action.

  “Very well,” the plump cadre said. “We don’t want to unnecessarily take up any more of your time, so let me speak frankly. Your family has been reported for rightist behavior. We have orders to search your home.”