Soaring Through the Night Sky
THE NEXT MORNING, the woman boils water so we can wash our faces and hands. She makes tea and gives us each another bowl of jook. She smears more of her country medicine on our feet. She gives us old but clean footbinding cloths to use as bandages. Then she follows us outside and helps my mother back into the wheelbarrow. Mama tries to pay her, but she waves it away, refusing even to look at us again she’s so insulted.
All that morning we walk. Mist hovers above the fields. The smell of rice cooking over straw fires wafts to us from the villages we pass. May’s green hat and my hat with the feathers—both saved during Old Man Louie’s rampage—were carefully packed, so as the day wears on our skin parches and burns. Eventually May and I join Mama in the wheelbarrow. Our pusher never complains, never threatens to abandon us, never asks for more money. He stoically just keeps putting one foot in front of the other.
In the late afternoon, just as the day before, he turns down a pathway toward a farm that seems even poorer than the last one. The wife sorts seeds with a sleeping baby tied to her back. A couple of sickly children do other chores with extreme lassitude. The husband looks us over, calculating how much he should charge. When his eyes find my mother’s feet, he grins toothlessly. We pay more than we should for some dry patties made from ground corn.
Mama and May fall asleep before I do. I stare at the ceiling. I listen to a rat skitter along the walls of the room, stopping to gnaw on this and that. My whole life I was spoiled with what I ate, what I wore, where I slept, how I moved from one place to another. Now I think how easy it would be for May, my mother, me, and people like us—privileged and cared for—to die out here on the road. We don’t know what it means to get by on almost nothing. We don’t know what it takes to survive day to day. But the family that lives here and the woman who took us in last night do. When you don’t have much, having less isn’t so bad.
The next morning we walk around a village that’s been burned to the ground. On the road we see those who tried unsuccessfully to escape: men bayoneted and shot, babies abandoned, and women, wearing only tunics, with the bottom halves of their bodies exposed and their bloody legs splayed at odd angles. Just after noon, we pass dead Chinese soldiers moldering in the hot sun. One is curled into a ball. The back of his hand rests in his mouth as if in his last moments he was biting back pain.
How far have we gone? I don’t know. Maybe fifteen miles a day? How far do we have to go? None of us knows that either. But we have to keep going and hope that we don’t encounter any Japanese before we reach the Grand Canal.
That evening, our pusher repeats his pattern of turning down a dirt path toward a shack, only this time the people are gone, as though they just stepped out. But all of their belongings seem to be here, including their chickens and ducks. Our pusher rummages through the shelves until he finds a jar of salted turnips. We watch—useless and helpless—as he makes the rice. How is it that after three full days together we still don’t know his name? He’s older than May and me but younger than my mother. Still, we call him Boy, and he responds with the respect his low position requires. After we’ve eaten, he looks around until he finds some mosquito incense, which he lights. Then he goes outside to sleep by the wheelbarrow. We go into the other room, which has a bed made from two sawhorses and three wooden planks. Mats stretch across the boards, and a quilt stuffed with cotton batting lies at the foot of the bed. It’s too hot to sleep under the quilt, but we roll it out over the mats so we’ll have a little padding between our bones and hardness.
That night the Japanese come. We hear the scuffling of their boots, their harsh, guttural voices, and the wheelbarrow pusher’s cries for mercy. Whether on purpose or not, his suffering and death give us time to hide. But we’re in a two-room shack. Where can we conceal ourselves? Mama tells us to take the planks from the sawhorses and lean them against the wall.
“Slide in behind,” she orders. May and I look at each other. What’s Mama thinking? “Do it!” she hisses. “Do it now!”
Once May and I get behind the planks, Mama reaches in. She holds her bride-price bag and our papers wrapped in silk. “Take these.”
“Mama—”
“Shhh!”
She grabs my hand and wraps it around the bag and package. We hear her scrape one of the sawhorses across the floor. The planks push up against my sister and me, forcing us to turn our faces to the side. That’s how tight a space Mama has made. But we’re hardly hidden. It will be only a matter of time before the soldiers find us.
“Stay here,” she whispers. “Don’t come out no matter what you hear.” She grabs my wrist and shakes it. She switches to the Sze Yup dialect, not wanting May to understand. “I mean it, Pearl. Stay here. Don’t let your sister move from this place.”
We hear Mama leave the room and shut the door. Next to me May takes shallow breaths. Each exhale falls on my face warm and moist. My heart thumps in my chest.
From the other room we hear the door being kicked open, the stomp of boots, loud military voices, and soon enough Mama pleading and bargaining with the soldiers. At one point, the door to this room swings open. Lantern light flickers in from the sides of our hiding place. Mama screams—sharp and shrill—the door shuts, and the light goes away.
“Mama,” May mewls.
“You have to be quiet,” I whisper.
We hear grunting and laughing, but nothing from our mother. Is she already dead? If she is, then they’ll come in here. Don’t I have to do something to give my sister a chance? I drop the things Mama gave me, and then I slide to my left.
“No!”
“Quiet!”
In our flattened space, May holds on to my arm with one hand.
“Don’t go out there, Pearl,” she pleads. “Don’t leave me.”
I jerk my arm, and May’s hand falls away. As quietly as possible, I edge out from behind the planks. Without hesitation I walk to the door, open it, step into the main room, and close the door behind me.
Mama’s on the floor with a man inside her. I’m struck by how thin her calves are, the result of nearly a lifetime of walking—rather, not walking—on her bound feet. Another dozen or so soldiers in yellow uniforms, leather shoes, and carrying rifles slung over their shoulders stand around, watching, waiting their turns.
Mama groans when she sees me.
“You promised you would stay where you were.” Her words are weak with pain and sorrow. “It was my honor to save you.”
The dwarf bandit atop my mother slaps her. Strong hands grab me and pull me this way and that. Who will get me first? The strongest? The man in my mother suddenly stops what he’s doing, pulls up his trousers, and bullies his way through the others to try to seize me for his prize.
“I told them I was alone,” Mama mutters in despair. She tries to stand but gets only as far as her knees.
In the insanity of the moment, somehow I remain calm.
“They can’t understand you,” I say, coolly, unfazed, not thinking for fear.
“I wanted you and May to be safe,” Mama says as she weeps.
Someone pushes me. A couple of the soldiers go back to Mama and hit her on the head and shoulders. They shout at us. Maybe they don’t want us talking, but I’m not sure. I don’t know their language. Finally one of the soldiers tries English.
“What is the old woman saying? Who else are you hiding?”
I see greed in his eyes. There are so many soldiers and only two women, one of whom is a mother.
“My mother is upset because I didn’t stay hidden,” I answer in English. “I am her only child.” I don’t have to pretend to weep. I begin to sob, terrified of what’s going to happen next.
There are certain moments when I fly away, when I leave my body, the room, the earth, and just soar through the night sky searching for people and places I love. I think of Z.G. Would he see what I’ve done as a supreme act of filial piety? I think of Betsy. I even think of my Japanese student. Is Captain Yamasaki nearby, aware that it’s me, hoping that May will be discovered? Is he thinking about how he wanted her as a wife but now he could have her as a war trophy?
My mother’s beaten, but even her blood and her screams don’t stop the soldiers. They unwrap her feet, the bindings swirling through the air like acrobats’ ribbons. Her feet look the color of a corpse gone cold—bluish white with shades of green and purple beneath the crushed flesh.
The soldiers pull and prod them. Then they stomp on her feet to try to bring them back into “normal” shape. Her cries are not those of footbinding or childbirth. They’re the deep, anguished screams of an animal experiencing agony beyond comprehension.
I close my eyes and try to ignore everything they’re doing, but my teeth itch to bite the man on top of me. In my mind I keep seeing the bodies of the women we passed on the road earlier today, not wanting to see my own legs in those unnatural, inhuman angles. I feel tearing—not like on my wedding night—but something much worse, something searing, as though my insides are being torn apart. The air is thick and gummy with the suffocating smells of blood, mosquito incense, and Mama’s exposed feet.
A few times—when Mama’s cries are the worst—I open my eyes and see what they’re doing to her. Mama, Mama, Mama, I want to cry out, but I don’t. I won’t give these monkey people the pleasure of hearing my terror. I reach out and grab her hand. How can I describe the look that passes between us? We’re a mother and daughter being raped repeatedly, for all we know until we both die. I see in her eyes my birth, the endless tragedies of mother love, a total absence of hope, and then somewhere deep, deep in those liquid pools a fierceness I’ve never seen before.
The whole time I silently pray that May will stay hidden, that she won’t make a sound, that she won’t be tempted to peek out the door, that she won’t do anything stupid, because the one thing I won’t be able to bear is for her to be in this room with these … men. Pretty soon I don’t hear Mama anymore. I lose all awareness of where I am and even what’s happening to me. All I feel is pain.
The front door scrapes open, and I hear the sound of more boots tramping on the hard-packed earth. The whole thing is horrible, but this is my worst moment, knowing that there’s more to come. But I’m wrong. A voice—angry, authoritative, and as rough as grating gears—bellows at the men. They scramble to their feet. They adjust their trousers. They smooth their hair and wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands. Then they stand at attention and salute. I lie as still as possible, hoping they’ll think I’m dead. The new voice yelps out orders—or is it a reprimand? The other soldiers bluster.