Li Ang: The Lost Garden

Soon afterward, the man started showing up frequently, and always when she was on her way home after school. She’d be walking down Lucheng’s main thoroughfare, the newly named Zhongshan Road. The crowd would begin to thin out after she passed the small-gauge train stop. The man would materialize from a corner, always dressed in the suit that had turned white from too many washings, the sleeves worn to the point of being threadbare. The pant legs were wide, loose, and shapeless, with no sign of a crease down the middle. He asked pretty much the same questions each time, whether Father had any frequent visitors, if he’d ever said down with someone. Over and over, nothing new. She grew used to him after he’d shown up a few times.

Then he stopped coming. When the new semester began after the winter break, another man appeared. Similar appearance, same questions, the only differences were, he was younger than the other man, with a gentler voice and a smile. Once he even brought her a bag of sweets, a common treat available in just about every little general store. They were bright orange round candies sprinkled with sugar crystals. He’d wrapped them in a piece of paper torn from a school notebook, which he must have been holding for quite some time, because the sugar crystals had melted and turned the paper into a warm sticky mess. When he opened the packet to show her, all she saw were orange pieces of candy.

Yinghong giggled and ran away. She returned home to tell Mudan that someone had offered her some cheap, filthy candy. Amita Buddha! Mudan grumbled, scolding her for her poor attitude toward things. The God of Thunder will punish you, Mudan said, before warning her to watch out for bad people who lured little kids with candy and then sold them. She told Yinghong to never take food from a stranger.

“I wouldn’t have eaten that candy if he’d given it to me.”

Yinghong pouted while she unwrapped a piece of candy wrapped in colorful paper that her father had asked someone to bring back from Taipei.

The young man came a few more times and then was replaced by the previous, older man, who had grown visibly thinner. His faded blue Sun Yat-sen outfit was hopelessly wrinkled, now looking much too big on his slight body.

“Good little girl—”

“My name is Zhu Yinghong and my father is Zhu Zuyan.”

She cut him off impatiently and supplied an answer to the same old questions, which she could recite backward and forward, before he even began.

Caught off guard, the man didn’t know how to continue, now that the order had been disrupted. A look of displeasure flickered across his face, but he struggled to control his temper. He had to think a moment before finding the questions in the right sequence.

“Does your father have any frequent visitors?” he asked.

“No.” Her answer was short.

“What does your father usually talk to you about?”

“Nothing.”

She began by answering him in her usual casual manner, but then she recalled the young man who’d wanted to give her candy. The recollection led her to believe that the whole process could be a game, so she decided to make fun of the older man by imitating his accent and tone of voice:

“Has he ever talked to you about who’s a bad person, or said down with someone, or that someone should be taken out and shot?” she asked with mock seriousness.

The man reddened, his swarthy face suddenly a murky dark red that extended all the way down to the exposed part of his neck above the tunic collar. Pointing a shaky finger at her, he shouted in a shrill, husky voice:

“All right, you fucking little girl. How dare you mock me? Why aren’t you fighting the communists like me? Well, fuck your ancestors, all eight generations of them!”

She didn’t quite understand what he was saying, but she instinctively backed away at the sight of his red face and the sound of his screaming voice.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of things right now. Your father has secret friends and he’s planning a rebellion. He’s going to rebel. Isn’t that right? Tell me!” The irate man advanced menacingly. “I’ll kill you if you don’t. Don’t think I won’t.”

Too frightened to move, she began to wail.

“Tell me. Tell me your father plans to rebel. If you don’t, I’ll arrest you and throw you in jail. There’ll be ghosts, headless ghosts and hanging ghosts, that’ll come to get you at night.”

He bent down, his big, dark-red face right in front of her, stuck out his tongue, and rolled his eyes to show only the white. Instinctive self-preservation made her forget that she was crying. She took off running.

“Run all you want, but you can’t get away. Go ahead, show me where you’re running to.”

She quickened her pace as the heavy footsteps behind her drew closer.

It was dusk on a school day, and Lotus Garden, being on the outskirts of town, seldom saw much foot traffic. At this hour there wasn’t another soul in sight. Tears returned to her eyes, and she could hear the man’s shouts behind her:

“It’s all because of you communists that I can’t go home. I’m going to kill all of you, you damned communists!”

She was panting hard by now, after running and crying at the same time, so she slowed down, but when she looked back, she saw, to her horror, that he was gaining on her. At that moment, a woman with a bamboo basket on her arm ducked out of the small roadside Earth God temple. Yinghong instinctively exhausted her last bit of energy to run up and take refuge behind her.

Peeking out from behind the woman, she saw that the man had also stopped. His swarthy face had turned sickly pale and was crisscrossed with tears that flowed unstopped from under his puffy eyelids; two streams of sticky yellow snot ended at his upper lip. Not knowing what to do next, he stood still, his eyes staring straight ahead. Then he abruptly squatted down peasant-style, and began to howl. She heard him sniffle as he muttered:

“It’s all … you communists … because of you I can’t … can’t go home … can’t go home. Communists …”

She ran all the way home, face and body bathed in sweat in the bitter cold of late winter. That night she ran a high fever that came and went, keeping her home for nearly a month before she returned to school. By then everyone had finished the second semester’s first monthly exam.

When she graduated from high school and was ready to leave for college in Japan, her father, believing she was old enough to know the truth, talked about his arrest years earlier. She sat with her head down; her hair, which had hardly grown from the required length for high-school girls, barely covered her earlobes, so her downy neck showed each time she lowered her head, forming elegant, graceful arcs that reached to her shoulders.

At one point she looked up and, after a momentary hesitation, asked in a firm, serious voice:

“What did Otosan do to warrant arrest?”

Her father’s face darkened and he seemed lost in thought for a moment.

“What I did was never the issue. Ayako, you must keep in mind that throughout the course of human history, knowledge has repeatedly gotten people into trouble. I was guilty of the crime of being an intellectual, of being able to think, and not easily manipulated.”

She began to tear up but forced the tears back. Father said in a feigned light tone:

“I was actually one of the lucky ones. They let me go because they thought I’d die from an infectious disease and wanted to show benevolence toward the Zhu family. They didn’t expect me to survive.” He paused, the lightness of a moment earlier vanishing. “But my life was over.”

Still with tears in her eyes, Yinghong managed a smile. She thought quietly for a while before venturing to ask: