The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (10 page)

But for the clicking of chopsticks and the occasional slurp from the patriarch, the newly expanded Mao family eats in silence. Tse-tung doesn’t look at his bride, nor does she
regard him. Jen-sheng, however, glances under the table at unnamed woman Luo’s magnificent bound feet, his eyes bright with the pride of being able to afford a wife of such limited mobility. The matchmaker, as expected, eats her portion in large mouthfuls and taps her chopsticks on her bowl in a blunt request for more. Woman Luo is quick to stand and give her a refill. No one else dares to take seconds. Other than the sweetened egg-cake, consumed at the end, their meal is squalid, gone in minutes.

Wen Ch’i-mei clears the bowls and takes them into the kitchen. “Tse-min,” calls Jen-sheng, snorting. He spits on the ground.

The groom’s heart thuds.

Tse-min enters the central room holding the small hand of his younger brother.

“It’s time for
yuan fang
,” says Jen-sheng.

The two younger boys skip out of the room, Tse-min almost dragging the toddler behind him.

Tse-tung and woman Luo rise solemnly and follow the boys. Tse-min and Tse-tan lead them into Tse-tung’s room, where the mattress has been re-stuffed and new cotton sheets laid on the bed. There are two fluffy feather pillows that the groom has never seen before. Several candles placed around the room cast a dim glow. Tse-min hauls his younger brother up onto the mattress, grabs the child by both hands, and begins to bounce with him. Tse-tan squeals with open-mouthed laughter. They hop for several minutes, shrieking with glee, but there are no smiles on the lips of either the bride or the groom.

The younger children finish their fertility rite and climb off the bed. Tse-tung and woman Luo sit on the new sheets, each taking a cup of wine placed beside the bed for them. They sip and exchange glasses without looking at each other, and then finish off the other’s wine. Tse-tan stares at his oldest brother with a frown, unsure why Tse-tung appears so serious and ill. He is unable to understand what could’ve gone wrong. Tse-min leads his younger brother away, closing the door behind him. The bride and groom are alone.

Yuan fang
. Now.

Tse-tung, unmoving, can only listen to the sound of his own breathing and the faint rasp of his bride beside him. He can’t seem to move. He can’t do anything at all, because he’s clumsy and awkward—this he knows about himself—and because he has no idea how to touch a woman, or how he’s supposed to handle his slowly engorging penis, and is certain if he tried to put it in her he’d do it wrong. Woman Luo, who has the clear sophistication of bound feet and perfect features, would not be able to suppress the crushing laughter at her idiotic husband. And then, in the morning, when Tse-tung’s mother comes to fetch the sheets so she can scrub away the blood in the yard, she will learn of her son’s failure and know that he’s not a man. And, worse still, Wu or some other labourer will also see the crisp white sheets and know his failure as well, and all the peasants in Shaoshan and beyond will laugh at Tse-tung, and mock him to his face in the fields, and again at the village store, and again at the tea house.

Unnamed woman Luo emits a tiny, muffled cough from
deep inside her chest. She lies back in bed, careful not to rustle the sheets as her body meets the mattress. Tse-tung clenches his teeth but remains upright. In his peripheral vision, he sees his wife’s knees and firm thighs through her red dress. He leans forward to spy her tiny feet, but they’re hidden at this angle. Now that she’s moved, Tse-tung tells himself that he can do more, that he can look directly at her body—yes, anything he wants. He can take off her shoes if he so desires. He can touch and squeeze her, seize her with all his strength.

He musters up the courage to turn and regard his new wife. In his youth and inexperience, he sees a landscape, the rolling field of a recumbent belly, breasts looming like forbidden mountains. Farther beyond that range, woman Luo’s dark eyes lie open like two gaping mine shafts, plundered and glassy, staring at the ceiling. She does not acknowledge his glance, although she must be aware of it. She is waiting for him, but still somehow dead to the world.

Waiting for me
, thinks Tse-tung.
That body, so easy to touch. So easy to reach out my hand and feel that rough cotton. Unfasten the buttons on her dress. Pull it apart and see what’s beneath. Smooth skin. Lift her leg and peel the shoe. Touch the turned-in foot. Right there: yours. Climb on top of her and press her arms into the mattress and push yourself deep inside her. You must act like a man. You are her husband
.

Tse-tung’s arm feels trapped under a heavy stone. He wants to beg her to show some sign of life, a twitch in her fingers, or, better yet, a glance in his direction. Why won’t she acknowledge him?

“Miss Luo,” he says—but he’s shocked and sickened by the sound of his own voice. The tone, so much lower than usual, is the same as his father’s.

It’s enough to turn Tse-tung away from his bride. With his weak body leaning forward, he thinks,
No, not Father, never be like him—cruel and callous and violent
. He tucks his hands into the tight crevice of his lap. Luo’s presence in this room, lying on his bed, sucking in the humid air that should be reserved for his use alone, and mocking him with all her fancy sophistication, suddenly enrages Tse-tung. Get out of here! He wants to scream at her, out of the marriage dressing, out into the courtyard! He clenches his teeth together and crashes back on his bed, his hat tumbling onto the sheets. Although he’s lying next to his wife, staring at the same ceiling as her, Tse-tung might as well be in Peking.

A mosquito taps and taps against the ceiling, pulling away each time as if the boards were made from heated iron.

If only Tse-tung could melt into the mattress. He doesn’t know what he should do now; he can’t lie here forever. He is as trapped as the tiger the villagers caught last month in the pass. He knows he has no choice. His duty is
yuan fang
. He has gone through with the marriage and now it
must
be completed. But the thought of reaching over to touch woman Luo’s breast instills such panic that it halts his breath and makes him nauseous. Tse-tung raises his hands to his face and presses his palms into his eyes. He feels that the torrential downpours of planting season are now swirling inside him, a confusion of contrasting forces—the heat of his desire rising, the hail of his shame falling. He knows that his
father wasted no time fucking his mother on their wedding day. He surely took what was his without a second thought.
Yuan fang
in one greedy minute. He plunged into her, fast and hard, careful not to waste time on the deed because the man thinks time is better spent on planting paddies, milling grain, selling futures downriver.

Tse-tung squeezes his eyes shut, wishing he could banish the image of his father violating his mother. But yes, the old miser must’ve torn through his mother, a quick furrow of her rich fields to claim them as his own.

The painful seconds of inaction grow into minutes. Tse-tung lies still beside his bride in the heat and dim light. Neither speaks. They blink and blink, staring at the rough palm boards above them, as if the ceiling might hold some insight into their joint future.

There’s a mantra of sorts passing through unnamed woman Luo’s head.
Now, now, now
. The rite is unfulfilled.
Yuan fang
is incomplete. It’s incomprehensible to her that he doesn’t just do it. Her body is seized with terror, with an awesome responsibility unfulfilled, encapsulated in this mantra of increasing fury, ultimately targeted inward, at her own unworthiness.
The rite, the rite, the rite
. She has long since suppressed her fear of the intimate act, to be performed for the first time with a hostile stranger. She doesn’t feel any relief, or harbour a secret desire for her new husband to fail. There is too much haze between Luo’s young body—wrapped tightly in cotton and entrenched in Confucian responsibility—and the so-called self that might desire an individual way. She cannot imagine a veering from
the straight and pointed prescriptions of
yuan fang
or other rites.

Woman Luo, six years older than Tse-tung but still only twenty, has no name, has never had a name, never even imagined a name for herself. She has never met a woman in possession of an individual name. It is impossible for this girl to conceive of herself as an independent actor in the world. She knows that she only has worth as a body engaged in specific duties and requirements. Wash, sow, feed, mill. Earn a high bride price through impeccable manners and abilities. Marry and produce many sons. When she recalls her nightly pain from many years ago, those throbbing explosions centred in her broken toes and arches that sent shock waves up her legs, the months of immobility and subsequent tender steps, and even her wretched and putrid feet when finally unwrapped—the way they glistened with pus in the candlelight—she must also recall her grandmother’s whispered reminders about marriage and
yuan fang
, about this night, this very rite. Her grandmother’s soothing voice accompanying the terrible sting of the washcloth, the bite of tighter wrapping, the extended agony. “Marriage is the purpose of your life.” This rite of
yuan fang
. Everything must be buried away beneath this rite. And then she will have sons. Even the infuriating scratch in her chest, the first tickling of the tuberculosis that will leave her dead in two years, her insatiable need to cough as she lies on her husband’s bed, is suppressed beneath her fierce need to complete the rite, as it has been all day. One does not cough in the sedan. One does not cough in the tea ceremony. One does not cough
in
yuan fang
. There is no question about that. The pain in her chest is nothing compared with the agony she feels from the complete and total inaction of the boy lying beside her.

An agony that won’t abate for the young bride tonight.

The rice paddies of Shaoshan valley are flooded for planting season. Tse-tung has hidden himself on a knoll, in the cool shade of a pine tree, near the old tomb wall. His conical hat and a half-empty sack of young rice shoots rest beside him.

He has been reading and rereading a section of
Water Margin
, his favourite novel, under this tree for an hour. In it, the novel’s hero, Sung Chiang, kills his evil blackmailing wife Yan Poxi. Tse-tung has been imagining himself as that noble head clerk, wearing long silk robes, charging through the governor’s
yamen
on important business—the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman manipulate or corner him. After killing Yan Poxi, who’s been threatening to expose his growing relationship with the rebel factions, the hero retreats into the mountains and joins the fabled bandits at Liang Shan Po. Tse-tung admires how Sung Chiang smiles at his enemies and pledges allegiance to the authorities—but when cornered, proves quite adept at double-crossing them. He never has a wrong instinct. Tse-tung decides that he too will be fierce against injustice, generous to a fault, and the model of filial piety.

His gently floating fantasy snags on the barb of reality. He is incapable of filial piety. Neither Sung Chiang nor Tseng Kuo-fan, another of Tse-tung’s heroes, the great Hunanese
leader who defeated the Taiping rebels and established a new Confucian orthodoxy, would ever have refused
their
fathers. Both of them would have performed
yuan fang
with woman Luo. All the helium of the boy’s fantasy escapes through this rough tear, leaving him deflated and limp.

His bowels rumble and he grimaces in discomfort, shifting his weight so he can release a loud fart. The smell is acrid and sharp, product of a troubled body. He can’t go on like this, with so much stomach trouble, nausea, exhaustion, and weight loss. He’s passed three endless nights without sleep, unnamed woman Luo lying beside him, her legs parted, ready for
yuan fang
. Three nights with only an hour or two of rest. His temples are throbbing and there’s a dull ache in his legs.

Now Tse-tung recalls his father’s vicious goading at the dinner table. “Why don’t you stick her? Look, she’s very pretty. It’s not like we married you to a plowing ox. It’s your duty to make her bleed.” After getting no response, his father turned his wrath on woman Luo, who sat curled over her rice, unable to look at anyone directly in her state of constant humiliation. “Make yourself pretty, woman. Smile at the boy. Why don’t you show him what you’ve got? You’re not married without
yuan fang
. It’s your duty to produce a son.”

A patch of dark cloud passes overhead, dulling the midday light. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Tse-tung studies the low cover and guesses that it will pour in a few seconds, a rain lasting three or four minutes at most, and probably ceasing as quickly as it began. This is not unusual for a spring afternoon in Shaoshan. He feels the pressure all around
him in the volatile pre-storm air, much like the climate in the village whenever he’s present—the incredulous squints and open grins of the labourers and landowners in the tiny shop where he exchanges sugar for pork, and the gossip and laughter at his expense as soon as he leaves. He knows what they’re saying about him. “Did you hear that Mao Tse-tung hasn’t yet slept with his wife? Impotent Tse-tung.”

The rain collapses on the countryside all at once. Tucked under the tree, only sporadic, thick drops pass through the foliage to smack against Tse-tung’s homespun clothes. He pulls his knees into his chest and hides his book behind his back. He shakes his head at the dirt, wishing he could disappear, but then chastising himself for that desire. He knows Sung Chiang wasn’t as lazy as he is, always reading under a tree. He knows that he wouldn’t last a single week in the company of real bandits. No, he would be mocked and forcibly expelled from their hideout. Why would heroic bandits want to have as a brother a little boy who can’t even sleep with his wife—no, not even a boy, but a weak, crying girl with dainty hands, a high voice, and an awkward shuffle? All he is missing are the bound feet.

The sunlight cuts through the dark clouds in angled shafts as the rain lessens. From atop his knoll, Tse-tung spies the labourer Wu working a few hundred metres away, standing ankle deep in the flooded field, his back bent as he plants young shoots. The clouds pass and the world floods with light, the irrigation pool sparkling around the rows of young shoots. Tse-tung wonders if Wu can provide him with a path out of Shaoshan, an escape from his humiliation. He grabs
his book and tucks it into his large sack, slinging the sack around his shoulder. He puts on his rattan hat and marches into the muck of the rice paddy.