Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

I’m on the road for a day before I see another person. The man’s walking toward me, but seems too frail and old to get any intelligible information from, so I salute him and walk past, but he yells “You there, Yankee fan, you part of occupation forces blitzing south instead of west as I past heard?” I run back and hug him and say how happy I am to speak to someone in English again, “though I haven’t a clue as to what you’re saying to me.”

“Suspect it’s my English then, which I haven’t spoken since one New Zealand missionary lady learned it to me in Nan-ch’ang some thirty years ago. Name of Dot Gentle, a Mrs. — you know her, familiar with her good looks and name?” I tell him I’m not and ask why the road’s so empty. He says he’s surprised I haven’t heard about China’s newest and perhaps greatest disaster. It seems that American bioresearchers were testing a new nerve agent in a Taiwan proving ground when, because of an unforecasted storm, several chemical gas clouds blew across the China Sea. Once the gas reached China it was discovered it had no effect on the nervous systems of Chinese inhabitants but worked with unintended superlative results as a herbicide, for in a week this agent acting as a multiplying virus spread so fast that most of the arable land in the Fukien and Kwantung provinces were made infertile and the crops were destroyed. By the time American bioagricultural scientists could come up with a counterreactant to the herbicide, a civil war had started between the more reactionary political faction, which insisted China declare war on America for its chemical invasion, and the group in power, which said that war with America would be national suicide for China and so it was the reactionary faction that had to be crushed. Diplomatic relations between China and America were once more restored, arms and food were sent in from the States, and the two countries were now fighting side by side against the rebels. A new era in international peace and cooperation will begin once the war ends, world experts have said, though by the time it comes most of China’s cities and farmlands and maybe a quarter of its people might be destroyed. Right now twenty million homeless Chinese are plodding this way from the ravaged South, eating everything in their path like twenty billion locusts.

I give the man half my provisions and head back to the prison. With its solid walls and vast food reserves, it’ll be the safest place to stay till the Americans come; and where I know I won’t starve.

It takes me a day to get back, but the prison’s locked. I ring, and a caged window in one of the gate doors opens and the eyes of Commandant Ep appear.

“You leave something behind?” he says, and I tell him I want to get back in, since I heard that living’s going to become extremely hazardous outside.

“Can’t do. Orders from loyalist command state that I and my soldiers return from the front, where we had previously been ordered to go to fight, to occupy the prison against all possible enemies of China and also against the expected onslaught of the landless millions migrating north. This prison will soon be of indispensable use to China and even more so when the war ends, and the government doesn’t want it recklessly torn down. Besides, you’ve no right requesting entrance here, as officially you’re no longer a prisoner. I, myself, once ordered to do so by loyalist command because of American material help and armed intervention on our side, pushed the button that released the doors of the ten American cells. Why you didn’t leave with your colleagues, or more like it, why they left you behind, is something I didn’t understand. Fleeing as I did to fight the rebels, I never had time to find out, but it was probably because of your disagreeable pushy nature, which even now you so openly employ. What you and your colleagues did with this new freedom was of no concern to me, till I learned several days ago that you’re all, by far, not thought of as free men in your own country. On the contrary, very important American leaders have recently denounced you for lying, for the purpose of making prison life here easier for yourselves, about being on a spy plane over China. For this crime you’ll each, when caught, receive a reported prison term in America for many years.”

“We told the truth about that flight. Each of us, in fact, was given a few hundred dollars extra a month because of the risks of that flight and many others, and you know that as well as anyone.”

“Let me be frank with you, Soldier Namurti, although later at your trial say I told you this and I’ll deny it with a rage. One of America’s quick bargain-table conditions for its material help and entry into our civil war was that loyalist China retract all of its espionage charges against America, as America didn’t want to ally itself with a country that on record still considered it a liar. Naturally, the charges were withdrawn — I understand that the rebels, once the war had begun, would have agreed to the same conditions for similar American assistance — and now your country accuses you of giving aid and comfort to what at the time was its enemy.”

I walk away while Ep is deciding out loud whether reimprisoning me for the oncoming Americans is worth having to feed me during these food-shortage times, and head north. South is where the famine and refugees are. And from the east, the old man told me, American forces are moving west to join with the loyalists to smash the rebels for good, and I don’t want to be captured by them, flown home for a treason trial and maybe put away for life or possibly even executed.

I walk for days till I come to hills that seem to have plenty of woods for protection, and climb the hill that has the best view of the valley. Two Chinese are living at the top — a girl of about seventeen and a boy who’s around five. They’re frightened when they see me and hide behind a clumsily built lean-to for two days. I make no attempt to befriend them, though do make a point of exhibiting my dried fish and seaweed and bag of rice. When they come out and walk hesitantly toward me, she says “Lin,” and touches her chest, and I touch my chest and say “Jamie.” We shake hands, the boy hugs my waist, and I give her the rice to cook, since what I forgot to pack is a cooking utensil. She later accepts my offer to rebuild their lean-to, and the day after I give them my blanket for the cold nights, she asks me to sleep inside.

A few days later we see an army of refugees on the road that takes a week to pass. In a month, the American troops pass, and the month after that another American army comes from the east. The war must be over, because the second army brings materials and equipment instead of weapons. From our hill cover we watch the Americans repair the road, the Chinese refugees in the backs of trucks return to the south, and then the Americans widen and repave the roads into highways and level the trees and huts and farms along the highway and replace them with American-style ranch houses and then suburban track developments along with shopping centers and malls, trailer courts, industrial parks, a sports complex and an oil refinery, and farther off we see a six-lane freeway approaching. The smaller hills around us are cut down to bumps, and more developments rise on them and also on the planed-down steps of the larger hills.

One day two non-Chinese climb up our hill with surveying equipment. Lin, her brother Chu, and our baby Sun Goddess and I hide behind a clump of trees and watch the men eat lunch, take lots of land measurements and then discover our two-bedroom cottage and garden and chicken coop. When they start walking in our direction I throw a rock at them and shout “Don’t come any closer or I’ll drop a few grenades on your heads.” One of them says “Hey, you’re American. Well, nice surprise, brother, and welcome; we’re Americans too. The war’s been over for three years, haven’t you heard? Nothing to be worried about anymore — this country’s been pacified. The whole of freaking Asia’s been pacified. China and Stateside are the greatest of buddies now. And any man who can build that shack with just the material he found lying around and who knows with what tools, should have no trouble tying in with the big boom going on here. So come on out, fella, we’re your best friends.” I yell that I’ll give them to ten to get off my property or I’ll start zeroing in on them, and they leave.