A Loyal Character Dancer

Feng was no longer young. It might be his last chance to have a child. Hers, too. So she asked him to postpone the trip. He would not. He did make a phone call home shortly after his arrival in New York. After several weeks’ unexplained silence, he called again to tell her that he was trying to get her out. He wanted her to apply for a passport. She was confounded. Wives left behind usually had to wait for years. Sometimes they, too, had to be smuggled illegally. While waiting for a passport, she got a telephone call that alarmed her and she fled to Suzhou.
     
    It was a long narrative, and difficult to follow, as from time to time, Wen was choked by emotion. Still, she went on resolutely, sparing them no painful details. Chen understood. Wen was catching at her last shred of hope; that the cops would let her stay after hearing a detailed account of her miserable life with Feng. Chen grew more and more uncomfortable. He could write his report to the bureau, describing her misery as he had promised, but he knew that it would be useless.
     
    Inspector Rohn was more visibly disturbed. She rose to make another cup of tea for Wen. Several times she seemed on the verge of saying something, but she swallowed her words.
     
    “Thank you, Wen, but I still need to ask you a couple of questions,” Chen said. “So it was in January that he asked you to apply for a passport.”
     
    “Yes, January.”
     
    “You did not ask how things were with him in the United States, did you?”
     
    “No, I did not”
     
    “I see,” he said. “Because you did not want to go there.”
     
    “How do you know?” Wen stared at him.
     
    “He wanted you to leave in January, but according to our record, you did not start applying for your passport until mid-February. Why did you change your mind?”
     
    “Oh, I hesitated at first, then I thought of my baby,” Wen said with a slight catch in her voice. “It would be too hard for him to grow up without a father, so I changed my mind and started the application process—in February. Then I got that call from him.”
     
    “Did he make any further explanation in that last call?”
     
    “No. He just said that somebody was after me.”
     
    “Did you know who that ‘somebody’ was?”
     
    “No, I did not. But I guess he must have had some quarrel about money with the gang. The boat people have to pay a large sum to those thugs. It’s an open secret in the village. Our neighbor Xiong failed to mail money back due to a car accident in New York, and his wife went into hiding because she was unable to pay his debts. The gangsters got hold of her in no time. They forced her into prostitution to pay them back.”
     
    “The Fujian police did not do anything?” Catherine asked.
     
    “The local police wear the same pants as the Flying Axes. So I had to run far, far away. But where? I did not want to go back to Shanghai. The gang might be able to trace me there. I should not bring trouble to my people.”
     
    “How did you decide to come to Suzhou?”
     
    “At first I did not have any specific place in mind. While trying to pack a few things, I came across the anthology with Liu’s business card in it. There seemed to be no possibility of tracing me to him. No contact between us since high school. No one could have guessed that I would turn to him for help.”
     
    “Yes, that made sense,” Catherine said. “The first time you saw him again was on his visit to the factory?”
     
    “I did not even recognize him during his visit. I had not much of an impression of him in high school. He was very quiet. I did not remember him talking to me at all. Nor the loyal character dance described in the poem. But for the poem he sent me, I would not have imagined that it had meant so much to him.”
     
    “It did.” Chen said. “You must have realized the visitor’s identity when you got the anthology.”
     
    “Yes. All those years came rushing back. In the biographical sketch, I learned that he had become a poet and reporter. I was happy for him, but I did not have any illusions about myself. Nothing but a pathetic object for his poetic imagination, I knew. I kept the book, and his card hidden in it, as a souvenir of my lost years. I never thought about contacting him,” she said, wringing her fingers. “I would rather die than go begging to anybody but for the sake of the baby.”
     
    “ ‘Folk east of the river,’” he murmured.
     
    “I had never expected he would