Little Gods Read online

  Dedication

  For my family

  Epigraph

  The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is.

  The past is not for living in . . .

  —John Berger, Ways of Seeing

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The End

  2007 Zhu Wen

  Yongzong

  Liya

  Zhu Wen

  Yongzong

  Liya

  The Beginning

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The End

  June 3–4, 1989

  From above, the heart of the city is easy to see. Beijing is a bull’s-eye. Concentric ring roads close in toward the old city walls, now paved into wide avenues. The avenues form a tight band around the heart: the south-facing gates, the moated palace, the desert square. On a map, diminishing circles draw in the eye, as if to say, Come.

  Bodies have come. In the square, bodies sit, stand, and lie on the hot paved stone. The square was built for six hundred thousand bodies; for weeks, there have been more. Rats sniff between folds of newspaper; flies regurgitate on sunburned shins; roaches scuttle across sleeping toes. Women in white uniforms weave through carrying metal tanks, spraying disinfectant where concrete shows. From above, this movement looks like a primitive organism, breathing. In the nucleus a burst of color radiates and contracts, radiates and contracts, as bodies leave the square, return and leave again. West of the outer ring, a dark mass gathers: troops preparing to enter.

  In every city and circumstance there are those who will go on with living. In the east quadrant, an old man circles his hutong courtyard for a morning stroll. By the northern lake a young couple wakes to Tian Mi Mi on the radio. South of the train station, three boys race to catch a hen escaping her coop. Between the second and third ring roads, a woman crosses a canal bridge on her walk to work. The woman has a round and candid face, and her hair, striped with white, has been brushed neatly off her forehead. She carries a sensible black purse over her shoulder that has served her for the good part of a decade. She is not chubby but her bones are sturdy, and she commands more space than a woman should.

  Normally this woman, a nurse, bikes to the hospital where she works, her lightly permed hair clipped at the base of her neck, a thin shawl draped over her arms to protect her skin from sun. In recent weeks the streets have been too crowded; she has had to take her feet off the pedals and toe her way through. This morning she has decided to walk the two kilometers. She clutches her purse to her side and steps through the people standing in her way. She advances slowly. Sweat beads on her lower back.

  She walks past a complex of luxury apartments. In one of the top windows she imagines a woman not unlike herself looking down and shaking her head. She heard once that wives of deposed government officials are given rooms here as a consolation prize, and ever since, she has thought of these buildings as the widows’ towers. Whenever she sees them she is reminded of how she wouldn’t mind so much being a widow. Being a widow would give her a simple answer for the question of why she has no husband.

  The faces crowding the nurse are young, the faces of children. The nurse has never been so foolish as to have children of her own. She learned long ago that she does not like what children grow into. She remembers herself as a high school student, how her grown-up heart felt trapped in her adolescent body. Looking back, it is clear that the opposite was true: her body had been more mature. As a result of this mistake, in the early days of the Cultural Revolution she and her classmates stoned to death their high school physics teacher, a reasonable woman who wore her long hair in a bun at her neck. This is what the nurse sees in the faces of the children around her. A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks. Desperate to turn their own growing bodies, their own aches and despairs, into material that might reset the axes of worlds. What did it boil down to but children, giddy with breaking rules!

  She arrives at the hospital three minutes past seven and heads to the end of the north corridor. In the nursery her colleague is counting the newborns. There are eight, five boys and three girls, and they are lined up next to each other with the tops of their heads along the wall, swaddled under the incubation lamps like loaves of warm bread.

  The nurse cares for infants in a way that she cannot their grown counterparts. Perhaps it is because they are so helpless: nothing more than potential. She cares for them with the hope that they will grow not into humans but rather become something entirely new.

  Did you hear—her colleague asks—last night a car ran over some students?

  The question comes bursting out as if the girl has been holding it in all night.

  No license plate, nothing, she continues. And they say they found guns and helmets inside. Already there is bloodshed! What will it come to?

  Her colleague is a slim girl who wears her hair in a pert ponytail and just finished school the year before. The nurse finds her overly excitable. She hangs up her purse and changes into her frock.

  I guess you’d better go check the delivery unit, her colleague says, and the nurse exits through the swinging doors.

  The delivery unit is at the opposite end of the building, adjacent to the operating rooms. To reach it the nurse must walk through the maternity ward. Here, at seven fifteen in the morning, a handful of pregnant women are waiting with their families at the check-in windows for their numbers to be called. The nurse walks quickly, fixing her gaze ahead. But before she can reach the door at the end of the hall, her path is blocked by a face.

  It is a small face, with small, plain features, so plain, in fact, that the face resembles a blank paper, on which anything can be drawn. The mouth on the face moves, dots of sweat filming the edge where lip meets skin. For a long moment the nurse does not understand that the face belongs to a person—a woman, pregnant, nearly full term. The woman’s voice is soft and pleading and the nurse does not hear what it’s saying. She cannot stop looking at the woman’s blank face, at the mouth moving—the lips shaping, the wet tongue swelling, the slivers of teeth emerging and disappearing. Finally she steps back, blinking, and hears:

  Ahyi, my name is Su Lan, please help me. Here is my husband—the woman pulls forward a man—we are not from Beijing, we arrived just last week—

  The nurse pushes past. A shudder moves up her neck. It is not that she has never been accosted for help in the halls of this hospital before. No, something disturbing cuts through this woman’s voice, a desperation so bare it’s indecent. The nurse does not take a good look at the couple, but she has the impression that they are handsome and well-dressed. City people, even if they aren’t from Beijing—not, in any case, the type of people who should beg.

  Six of ten beds in the predelivery suite are empty, along with the delivery room itself. In the operating rooms the first cesarean has begun. The nurse slips in and waits, preparing identification tags and linens as blood-soaked cloths line the floor. Then the baby is out, a boy, and he is in the nurse’s arms on his way to the nursery before the surgeon’s needle has begun to mend his mother’s wound.

  In the nursery there is just one window, a small rectangle carved high in the wall. Some mornings the sun reaches through on its way to noon and fills the room with light. The faces of the newborns become so bright that the nurse can’t stand to look at them. The sun passes quickly, but in the minutes before the room returns to bare fluorescence, everything inside insists so baldly on its life that she must look at her shoes in embarrassment.


  This day is cloudy. Light presses on a sheet of gray. The nurse looks into the glow and tries to replace the images in her mind with that same static colorlessness. But one persists: the blank-faced woman, her moving lips. Ahyi, my name is Su Lan, please help me. In a flash she sees the husband pulled forward, his pupils narrowed, his lips thin. The nurse shakes her head. Briefly she wonders why the couple came to Beijing, if they were drawn by the same excitement as the other young people flooding the city. She picks up a boy who has begun to howl. She prepares to return him to his mother.

  When the injured come, the nurse is bathing an infant girl. It is past midnight and her shift has ended. Instead of standing in the nursery wiping dried amniotic fluid from this newborn’s red skin, she should be at home, facing the wall and trying to sleep.

  No replacements have arrived. She does not mind. Walking through the corridors, passing under open windows, she has heard muffled commotion straining the walls. She is not eager to push home through all that. She dips a cloth in warm water, washes and dries the infant, checks the tag on the foot. On the tag she reads 苏兰: Su Lan, a familiar name. Before she can place it, a yellow-green flash lights the window. Then a human noise hurtles into her ears, and in her eyes it is the woman from the morning, mouth in the shape of a scream.

  The nurse stands still, holding Su Lan’s daughter in both hands.

  The daughter begins to cry.

  The door opens: her colleague with another child.

  In the moment before the door swings shut, shouting in the hallway outside.

  God, her colleague says. His mother was just pushing him out when they—right into the delivery room.

  They?

  I’ve got to go, her colleague says, and hands the newborn to the nurse, who quickly wraps the new arrival and sets him under the lamp.

  All around the nurse the newborns are crying, red faces pinched against white cloth, wet lips open wide. All but Su Lan’s girl, who has suddenly grown silent as herself. She picks up the child. She knows it cannot see her. The newborn brain understands shapes and light but cannot process images farther than two lengths of hand away. Still she watches the child watch her, wondering what it dares her to do.

  Bodies are lining up in the halls. They come on cardboard stretched between two bicycles, on the flat beds of watermelon carts, in the arms of shouting strangers. A man in blue pants with a wound in his gut lies coiled on an unhinged door, hand curled around the knob. Mattresses are improvised, IVs inserted with bare hands. Nurses triage while wrapping wounds; an off-shift doctor runs through the gate. Trails of blood dry on the floor. In the morgue, volunteers step between bamboo mats, preparing a list of names.

  The delivery unit’s operating rooms have been taken over by urgent care. Scalpels that earlier extracted babies now extract bullets. Ten of ten beds in the predelivery suite are occupied, along with the floor space between them, by the wounded waiting. New and expecting mothers are moved into two rooms on the top floor. Their families trail behind, looking at their feet. The mothers are silent as they’re wheeled through the halls. Some pretend not to see. Some close their eyes and pray.

  Su Lan sits up with her eyes red and open, staring coldly into the faces of the wounded.

  The nurse stands in the center of the nursery, not knowing what to do. She has stood here for hours, checking vitals, preparing birth certificates, listening to waves of clamor erupt beyond the walls and ceilings and floors. Two more newborns have been brought in, the first by an overnight nurse from the inpatient building, who tells of the maternity ward move, the second by a teenage girl who calls herself a volunteer. The nursery is running out of space. By now, over half the babies should be back with their families. But no one has come to stay and the nurse cannot leave any newborns unattended.

  She checks temperatures and heart rates again. There have been no major complications all night, no early babies the size of her palm, no blue-skinned babies whose lungs need coaxing to breathe. Death, she thinks, is elsewhere occupied. She digs in the closet for the largest supply cart with high sides she can find. Syringes and boxes of gauze clatter to the floor. She pulls out the cart and presses her hands and arms on the metal trays to warm them. She pads the top and bottom layers with linens. In this way she squeezes all but one newborn onto the cart. She straps Su Lan’s daughter to her chest. The girl starts crying as she pushes the cart out the door.

  The hall stinks. Bodies lie perpendicular to the wall, bleeding and burned black. The nurse has seen plenty of blood and should not be surprised by it. In the operating room she has learned to dissociate blood from the human. But these people are not inside an operating room, and their blood does not seem material, like flesh or bone, but rather like a too-human thing. It is almost pretty. The nurse looks at the people along the wall and sees their blood as a painter sees paint, coloring in who they are. She pushes the cart through the hall. The living look up, blinking, at what she brings.

  The makeshift maternity ward is a mess of beds and chairs. Cots crammed in every space, families squatting on the floor. The nurse enters the first room with her cart. New parents and grandparents sit up and crane their necks. They catch their joy and hold it close, afraid or ashamed to hope. Outside, it is finally quiet. For the first time in months, the adjacent street is deserted.

  The nurse picks up the newborns and reads off the mothers’ names. Families come forward and collect their babies one by one.

  When her cart is empty she calls out the name Su Lan. There is no response. She sees a woman alone in the corner cot, a body turned to the wall. She unwraps the girl from her chest and walks over. She sits at the edge of the bed and waits.

  Finally the woman turns. Again the nurse is fascinated by her face, how each feature taken alone is plain and unmemorable: the small and single-lidded eyes, the straight nose, the pale lips. It is attractive but not pretty, not quite, and it strikes the nurse that it would be a good face for an actress—the kind of face that could become anything with just a few lines of makeup, that, like a mirror, reflects the viewer back upon herself.

  Su Lan’s eyelids are swollen, her eyes glassy. She looks at the nurse and says: Do you believe in time?

  Time?

  Do you believe, Su Lan continues, that the past is gone and the future does not yet exist?

  For a moment the nurse is quiet. Then she says, Yes.

  Su Lan stares. She begins to scream. The screams are short and breathy and sound like a repeating mechanical alarm. The nurse covers the daughter’s ears. Someone else’s mother-in-law leans over: Su Lan has been hysterical all night, calling for her husband. Apparently she begged the doctors to let him inside the delivery unit, but of course this was impossible. Afterward the man could not be found. The mother-in-law lowers her voice and looks meaningfully at the nurse. She says, When was the last time you saw a yunfu at the hospital all alone?

  A woman, all alone. The nurse wants to touch her. She wants to cover the screaming mouth and smooth the damp hair from the face.

  She wraps the daughter to her chest and stands to leave. Her legs buckle. She sits back down. For a moment she feels her exhaustion. She has not slept in over twenty hours. She has not eaten in ten. She shakes her shoulders and stands again, breathing slowly, and heads for the second maternity room.

  In the second room are women in labor, and one who just arrived, heaven knows how.

  Near dawn, Su Lan takes her child. She holds her daughter’s neck in her palm and does not smile. The nurse wants to say something to Su Lan, something final and wise, as if she is at this woman’s deathbed. She opens her mouth, closes it, stands up, leaves. She goes to a washroom, splashes water on her face, and steps outside. It is raining. She does not look at the stained ground or the smoldering carcasses of tanks and cars. She does not look at the elderly couple burning mourning money at the steps. She lights a cigarette and listens to the hiss. The front of her frock, where Su Lan’s daughter was strapped all night, is damp and suddenly cold.

/>   Su Lan will live for another seventeen and a half years—not an insignificant amount of time. Enough to turn an infant into a woman, a Chinese into an American. But the nurse’s feeling is correct. Today, Su Lan begins to die.

  2007

  Zhu Wen

  Your mother returned to Shanghai in June of 1989, a few days after the event. She was not wearing proper shoes. Instead, she had on these pink rubber slippers, the kind you can buy for half a yuan off the side of the street. They were too small, and dirty—you could tell she’d been wearing them for some days. This was unusual for your mother. Su Lan was the kind of person who presented herself carefully to the world, regardless of circumstance.

  She had left the longtang ten days earlier with her husband and one small bag. When she returned she had neither. In their place was you.

  Ten days—that’s how long it took for the swallow eggs to hatch too. That spring, a pair had nested above Su Lan’s window. Of course she hadn’t noticed. Perpetually insulated in the world of her work, Su Lan barely seemed aware of the protesters that passed daily under our windows, hollering slogans and singing songs. But I had seen bird droppings on the windowsill in early May. I watched the swallows build their nest, flying back with little bites of mud in their beaks and sticking them to the wood. When they were done they’d made a brown cone the size of my palm. The same day Su Lan and her husband left for Beijing, five white-flecked eggs appeared in the hollow. The parents perched on the ledge of the terrace and turned their heads this way and that, little red throats flapping as they sang.

  These nests had been a common sight in the neighborhood when I was a girl. I was afraid of them then—they looked like hornets’ hives. Until one day, as I walked home from school, following my big brother, my hand trailing the longtang wall, a baby bird fell from the sky. I’d caught it in my hands, almost dropped it in surprise. It was delicate and ugly. I could crush it with a little squeeze.