Death of a Red Heroine

Qinghai Lake . It was entitled “Night Talk.”
Creamy coffee, cold;
Toy bricks of sugar cubes
Crumbling, a butter blossom still
Reminiscent of natural freedom
On the mutilated cake,
The knife aside, like a footnote.
It is said that people can tell the time
By the change of color
In a cat’s eyes—
But you can’t. Doubt, a heap
Of ancient dregs
From the bottle of Great Wall
Rests in the sparkling wine.
    Zhang could not understand it. He just knew that some images were vaguely disturbing. So he skipped a couple of stanzas toward the end, to reach the last one.
Nothing appears more accidental
Than the world in words
A rubric turns by chance
In your hands, and the result,
Like any result, is called history . . .
Through the window we see no star.
Mind’s square deserted, not a pennant
Left. Only a rag picker of the ages
Passes by, dropping scraps
Of every minute into her basket.
    The words “mind’s square” suddenly caught his attention. Could that possibly be an allusion to Tiananmen Square? “Deserted” on a summer night of 1989, with no “pennant” left there. If so, the poem was politically incorrect. And the issue about “history,” too. Chairman Mao had said that people, people alone make the history. How could Chen talk about history as the result of a rubric?
    Zhang was not sure of his interpretation. So he started to read all over again. Before long, however, his eyesight grew bleary. He had to give up. There was nothing else for him to do. So he took a shower before going to bed. Standing under the shower head, he still thought that Chen had gone too far.
    Zhang decided to sleep on his misgivings, but his brain kept churning. Around eleven thirty, he got out of bed, turned on the lights, and donned his reading glasses.
    The apartment was so quiet. His wife had passed away at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Ten years, the living, the not living. It’s more than ten years. Then the telephone on the nightstand rang.
    It was a long distance phone call from his daughter in Anhui. “Dad, I’m calling from the local county hospital. Kangkang, our second son, is sick, his temperature is 104. The doctor says that it is pneumonia. Guolian has been laid off. We’ve got no money left.”
    “How much?”
    “We need a thousand Yuan as a deposit, or they won’t treat him.”
    “Give them what you have. Tell the doctors to go ahead. I’ll express mail it to you the first thing tomorrow morning.”
    “Thank you, Dad. Sorry to touch you like this.”
    “You don’t have to say that.” He added after a pause, “I’m the one to blame for all this—all these years.”
    So Zhang believed. For whatever had happened to his daughter, he held himself responsible. Often, with unbearable bitterness, at night he would recollect the distant moments of taking her to school, hand in hand, back in the early sixties. A proud child of a revolutionary cadre family, a bright student at school, her future in socialist China was rosy. In 1966, however, all that changed. The Cultural Revolution turned him into a counterrevolutionary, and her into a child of a black capitalist roader family, a target of the Red Guards’ revolutionary criticism. As a politically discriminated-against educable educated youth, she was sent to the poor countryside in Anhui Province, where she worked for no more than ten cents a day. He could never imagine what had happened to her there. Other educated youths received money from their families in Shanghai, or came back for family reunions at the Spring Festival, but she couldn’t. She had no family; he was still in jail. When he was finally released and rehabilitated in the mid-seventies, he could hardly recognize his child, now a sallow, deeply wrinkled woman in black homespun with a baby on her back. She had married a local mine worker— a survivor’s choice, perhaps. In those years, a mine worker’s monthly salary of sixty Yuan could have made a world of difference. There she soon became the mother of three. In the late seventies, she passed up the opportunity to return to Shanghai, for Party policy forbade any ex-educated youth like her from bringing her husband and children to the city with her.
    Sometimes he felt that, by torturing herself, she was torturing him.
    “Dad, you shouldn’t blame yourself.”
    “What else can I do? I have not taken good care of you. Now I’m too old.”
    “You don’t sound well. Have you overworked?”
    “No, it’s just the last task