Mulberry and Peach (2 page)

Conversation with the driver:

‘Hey, you want a ride? Where are you going?'

‘I'll go wherever you're going.'

‘We're going to Washington to join the March Against Death.'

‘I'll come along to watch the excitement!'

‘Where are you coming from?'

‘The moon.'

‘Don't be funny. So you're the moon princess, huh? Why did you come back to earth?'

‘I came back to start over. First, I want to have a baby so that human beings won't become extinct.'

‘Has the earth changed any since you've been gone?'

‘It's weirder, but it's more interesting.'

‘OK, Moon Princess, get in!'

Inside the car is a mess strewn with newspapers, paper, coke cans, boxes, cigarette butts. Overcoats, blankets, and sleeping bags are piled on the seats. Eight people are squeezed together on top of these things. Counting me, that makes nine. I don't know where they are from. They are talking about student demonstrations all over the world: Japan, England, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the US. They are talking about the dead. They tell me about the March Against Death, a demonstration against the war in Vietnam They tell me that such protests are becoming increasingly desperate and increasingly useless. But they want to show the world that people don't want to die anymore. Tonight in Washington 45,000 people carrying candles and wearing name tags with the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam, will walk single file from Arlington National Cemetery to the foot of Capitol Hill where there will be twelve coffins. The protest will last forty hours. Each person will place his name tag with the dead soldier's name in a coffin.

I tell them I also want to wear a tag. The name of the dead person is Mulberry.

They yawn one by one. It's boring to talk about death. The sun is shining right in our faces. Powdery snow drifts in the sunlight. If they keep on talking like this, I'm going to get out.

Someone in the front seat holds up a poster:

Instructions: What to do in case of Nuclear Attack

When the First Warning is Sounded

You said you wanted me to tell you about Mulberry. Today I'm sending you her diary. I'll be sending you more material about her, piece by piece. Let me tell you, I know every detail of her life. I know her thoughts, feelings, illusions, dreams, and memories. I even know things she didn't know or remember. We can work together on this. But you'll have to remember one thing: I am not Mulberry. She is afraid of you. But I'm not. As long as you don't call me by a dead woman's name, I can give you a lot of information about her.

I am also enclosing her photo album which she bought from a Japanese prisoner after the war, when she was returning from Chungking to her home in Nanking.

 

Peach
13 January 1970

(27 July 1945-10 August 1945)

 

 

CHARACTERS

MULBERRY, (16 years old), during the Anti-Japanese War, Mulberry is running away from home with her lesbian friend, Lao-shih. Sometime after her parents' marriage, Mulberry's father became impotent as the result of a wound received in a battle between rival Chinese warlords. Later, the mother, who before her marriage had been a prostitute, began an affair with the family butler, and began to abuse her husband and children. As the story opens, Mulberry is running away to Chungking, the wartime capital of China.

LAO-SHIH, (18), a dominating, mannish girl about Mulberry's age. Her father was suffocated in the huge tunnel in which people hid from the continuous Japanese bombing of Chungking in the summer of 1941.

THE OLD MAN, (in his 60s), he represents the traditional type of Chinese. He has been in flight from the Japanese since they occupied Peiping, his home, in 1937.

REFUGEE STUDENT, (in his 20s), he represents the generation growing up during World War II. He is patriotic, aware of his rootless condition. He is rebellious against the old system represented by his father, who had seven wives and forty-six children, and lived in a huge gloomy house in Nanking. His father works for the Japanese. The angry young man reveals the inevitability of the coming revolution.

PEACH-FLOWER WOMAN, (in her 20s), she represents the natural life force, vital, exuberant, sensuous and enduring. It is this spontaneous life force that has enabled the Chinese to survive thousands of years of wars, revolutions
and natural disasters. She became the wife of a boy seven years her junior when she herself was a child. She raised the baby husband, and worked hard on the farm. When the husband grew up, he left her and studied in Chungking. The rumour is that he lives with another woman in Chungking. Peach-flower Woman is going there with her baby to look for her husband.

 

 

There is no sun. There is no moon. There is no sky. The sky and the water are one, both murky. The river dragon stirs up the water. His hundred hairy legs and clumsy tail swish back and forth, churning the water.

From the window at the inn in Tai-hsi, I can see the mountains across the river, so tall I can't see the top, like a black sword piercing the sky. The sky dies without losing one drop of blood. The gorge suddenly darkens.

A torch flares up along the river. A paddlewheel steamboat, blasted in half by the Japanese, lies stranded in the dark water like a dead cow. Along the river several lamps light up. Near the shore are several old wooden boats. Our boat, crippled while rounding the sandbanks at New Landslide Rapids, is tied up there for repairs.

The village of Tai-hsi is like a delicate chain lying along the cliffs. There is no quay along the river. When you disembark you have to climb up steep narrow steps carved out of the cliff. When I crawled up those steps, I didn't dare look up at the peak, or I might have fallen back into the water, a snack for the dragon.

A torch bobs up the steps. After a while I can see that there is a man on horseback coming up the steps, carrying a torch. The torch flashes under my window and I glimpse a chestnut-coloured horse.

Lao-shih and I ran away together from En-shih to Pa-tung. I am sixteen and she is eighteen. We thought we could get a ship out of Pa-tung right away and be in Chungking in a flash. When we get to Chungking, the war capital, we'll be all right, or at least that's what Lao-shih says. She patted her chest when she said that to show how certain she was. She wears a tight bra and tries to flatten her breasts, but they are as large as two hunks of steamed bread. She said, ‘Chungking, it's huge city. The centre of the Resistance! What are you scared about? The hostel for refugee students will take care of our food, housing, school and a job. You can do whatever you want.' We are both from the remote mountains of En-shih and are students at the Provincial High School. Whatever I don't know, she does.

When we got to Pa-tung, we found out that all the steamships have
been requisitioned to transport ammunition and troops. Germany has surrendered to the Allies and the Japanese are desperately fighting for their lives. A terrible battle has broken out again in northern Hupeh and western Hunan. There weren't any passenger ships leaving Patung, only a freighter going to Wu-shan, so we took that. When we arrived in Lashing, we happened upon an old wooden boat which carried cotton to Feng-chieh, so we took that.

Towering mountains above us, the deep gorge below. Sailing past the Gorge in that old boat was really exciting, but it cracked up on the rocks of New Landslide Rapids and is now at Tai-hsi for repairs.

Lao-shih just went out to find out when the boat will be repaired and when we can sail. A unit of new recruits is camped out in the courtyard of the inn. Tomorrow they'll be sent to the front. I sit by the window and undress, leaving on only a bra and a pair of skimpy panties. The river fog rolls in and caresses me, like damp, cool feathers tickling my body. The river is black and I haven't lit the lamp. I can't see anything in front of me. The few lamps along the river go out one by one. Before me the night is an endless stretch of black cloth, a backdrop for the game I play with my griffin:

And the griffin comes alive in my hand, leaping in the darkness. The wings outstretched, flapping, flapping.

 

‘Hey.'

I turn. Two eyes and a row of white teeth flash at me from the door. I scream.

‘No, don't scream. Don't scream. I was just drafted and tomorrow I'm being sent to the front. Let me hide in your room just for tonight.'

I can't stop screaming. My voice is raw. When I finally stop, he is gone, but two eyes and that row of teeth still wink at me in the dark. A whip cracks in the courtyard.

‘Sergeant, please, I won't do it again. I won't run away again . . .'

The shadows of the soldiers in the courtyard appear on the paper
window. The man hangs upside down, head twitching. Beside him, a man snaps a whip and a crowd of heads looks up.

 

‘Lao-shih,' I pause and stare at the jade griffin in my hand. One of its wings is cracked. ‘I don't want to go to Chungking. I want to go home.'

‘Chicken. You getting scared?'

‘No, it's not that.'

‘You can't turn back. You have to go, even if you have to climb the Mountain of Knives. That's all there is to it, you know what I mean. Anyway, you can't go back now. Everyone in En-shih knows you've run away by now. Your mother won't forgive you either. You know when she was drunk, she would beat you for no reason, until you bled. She will kill you if you go back.'

‘No. She wouldn't do anything to me. As soon as I ran away, I stopped hating her. And I still have Father. He's always been good to me.'

‘Little Berry, don't get mad, but what kind of a man is he, anyway? Can he manage his family? He can't even manage his own wife. He lets her get away with everything while he sits in his study, the old cuckold, meditating. You call that a man? However you look at it, he's not a man.' She starts laughing. ‘You said so yourself. Your father wounded his “vital part” during the campaign against the warlords . . .' She is laughing so hard she can't go on.

‘Lao-shih, that's not funny.'

‘So why can't a daughter talk about her father's genitals?'

‘Well, I always felt . . .' I rub the jade griffin.

‘You always felt guilty, right?'

‘Mm . . . but not about his vital part!' I start laughing. ‘I mean this griffin I'm holding. I stole it when I left. Father's probably really upset about it.'

‘With all these wars and fighting, jewels aren't worth anything anyway. Besides, it's only a piece of broken jade.'

‘This isn't an ordinary piece of jade, Lao-shih. This jade griffin was passed down from my ancestors. Originally jade griffins were placed in front of graves in ancient times to scare away devils. My great-grandfather was an only son, really sickly as a child, and he wore this piece of jade around his neck and lived to be eighty-eight. When he died he ordered that it be given to my grandfather and not used as a burial treasure. My grandfather was also an only son. He wore it his whole life and lived to be seventy-five. Then he gave it to my father who was also an only son. He wore the griffin as a pendant on his watch
chain. I'll always remember him wearing a white silk jacket and pants, a gold German watch in one pocket and the jade griffin in the other pocket, and the gold chain in between, swishing against the silk. When he wasn't doing anything, he'd take it from his pocket and caress it and caress it and it would come alive. You know what I thought about when he did that?'

Lao-shih doesn't say anything.

‘I would think about what my great-grandfather looked like when he died. Isn't that strange? I never even saw him. I would imagine him wearing a black satin gown, black satin cap, with a ruby red pendant dangling from the tip of the cap, black satin shoes. He would have a squarish head, big ears, long chin, and thick eyebrows, his eyes closed, lying in the ruby red coffin with the jade griffin clasped in his hands.'