THE PEOPLE’S YOUTH by Julianne Ortale
On the day a crow flies into my house, the People’s Officers take our father to jail. When it happens, we have arrived home from school, wearing red paper chrysanthemums pinned to our breasts. Our windows have been broken and the door pasted with red pronouncements calling our family a disgrace. On this day I am six years old. My sister Mei Lin, seven. In fourteen days, I will be seven too.
When it happens, it is a Youth Festival day. Our father lifts us to the ceiling, first Mei Lin, and then me. Squirming between the boards he’d loosened we hide in the space between the ceiling and the roof, a space too thin for our mother and father. We hear broken glass under our father’s thin-soled shoes. Through the windows, rocks soar and ping, shattering cups and picture frames, the painting of our great-great-grandfather’s face rattles against the wall. Shouts from the street, Fuck your ancestors. I do not know why we are a disgrace.
When they break our door, our mother crosses her arms over her face. An officer bears down on her, wields a stick. A thudding and crack against her skull. She hiccups and a red stream leaks from her mouth carrying a white pearl, a tooth. The floorboards cry out as she falls to her knees. Our father makes the same sound as the boards, a low groaning creak. We cannot see his body, only his head pressed under a boot. A dark wound leaks from his newly shorn scalp. We see our mother, humped over her knees ground in glass. We hear our mother’s voice thick with wet: Fuck your ancestors, she says.
Through the ceiling boards poorly matched, her voice reaches us, coats us damp and sticky. Her head pulled back by her hair exposes her face. Her eyes find us in the space we see through. Our mother stares up into my eye. A soldier grasps her red tongue, cuts it off with his knife, hulls her mouth like a fruit that bleeds and bleeds. Feeds her tongue to our father, forcing it into his mouth. We hear him choke. He chews it in his bitter mouth under the canopy of our brittle black eyes. Our mother stares up at us, our mother who does not let us go, who speaks to us as water slips from our eyes because this is all we can do once we have seen her tongue cut out of her mouth, our mother’s tongue, glistening, shoved in our father’s throat like an insult, our father who eats it and swallows it crudely, and now her tongue will never stop speaking inside his body.
We dare move only long after the soldiers have taken our parents, bound at their ankles and wrists and knees. The neighborhood has fallen silent. Only then do we remove the boards, hanging from our splintered fingertips. Trembling there, our pale feet hover over the blood that seeped from our mother’s mouth. We think we can hear her words bubbling toward its surface. Our tongues dry and thick where we chewed them. Her dark blood now lit by a square of moonlight. We unfurl our thin bodies. Suspended, we dip our ankles into the slanted light, our skin opalescent in the light that cuts our feet from our shins left in shadow, our chests scooped by ache, arms stretched with our weight, our faces inward, lips pressed tight against cries that could not escape but hurtle against the inside of our bodies, against our ribs. Our feet hang like pairs of hung doves.
We stay awake through the fourth hour of the night. Rags in our hands, soaking blood of mother, of father, wet that comes up in slow smears, our heads bent in the slaughterhouse air. Mother’s blood, father’s blood soaking our feet, seeping into our soles cut by shards of cups. Words mother had said, father had said, lodge in the flesh of our feet, soak through cloth, through our palms.
Mei Lin sinks her hand in ashes from the rags we burned in a pail at dawn. Ashes the color of dried salt. Outside, a man’s feet slap cobblestone. Rickshaw wheels grind in ruts. Mei Lin spreads ashes on my arms, in the crook of my elbow, along the thin blue trail to my wrist, her teeth like crackled white glass. “Xiu Li, close your eyes,” she says. Her powdered thumbs press my eyelids, trace the shape of my mouth, between my lips, rubbing ash tart and bitter on my tongue.
On the day the crow flew into our house, before the officers came, in the noonday hour, we stood in the school yard, red paper chrysanthemums pinned to our breasts. In one hand, my first-year test papers. In the other, Mei Lin. We stood in the schoolyard fixed as the skeletons buried within us, our fingers twined bone on bone, in the aftermath of winter’s first snow. The sun was high and bright but offered little warmth. A sudden sharp breeze lifted the hairs on our necks. Our friends just days before, children who were born on the same street, in the long rows of houses sharing walls, surrounded us, wet our faces and shoes, our limp paper blooms with their spit. Hatred blurred their faces, smudged by the cottony tufts of their cold breath. Fuck your ancestors! It was Ha Yang leading them. On his tenth birthday he tied a rope around his father’s neck to lead him to the police while the People’s Youth March blared from speakers newly mounted on poles in the street.
More children came running with rocks in their fists.
In one hand, Mei Lin. In the other, my first-year test papers. One hundred percent marks in Chinese and Math. I wanted to show them to my father. He would be proud, I would hold them until we found our father.
On the seventh day, in the house with broken windows. We hide in the shadow next to the window’s gape, watching snow fall on cobblestones, daring a finger to touch the sill. Children play war in the street, their voices like New Year’s bells to scare old gods. They wear their Youth uniforms. The girls have new red scarves tied around their necks. They pack snow in their bare hands for the snow war. A truck hung with green tarp curtains trundles past our house, parting the war. The children throw snowballs at the truck, run up to its sides, part the tarp to see what’s inside. A man and a woman sit chained to a bench in the truck bed. The children throw snowballs at them. The woman’s face is smacked red. Her hair is caught in her mouth. The man tries to console her, to remove the hair from her mouth, but cannot. His hands are chained to the bench, and he can’t lift them high enough.
When all the houses in the row are quiet, in the second hour of the night, we cross our doorway into the street. Our feet cut by glass, cooled by snow. Our fingers white with cold. We pack snow into balls, silently. We put balls of snow down each other’s shirts, suck in our breaths, grinning, but do not cry out. We’ve torn a red cloth into strips, tied them as scarves around our necks. Mei Lin’s cracked teeth gleam under the winter moon.
On the tenth day, there is no food left in the house. Mei Lin has covered our mother’s picture with a black cloth against her absence. We chew our father’s belt. Mei Lin’s cracked tooth breaks away from the gum. She gives it to me, slick and reddened. I keep it in my pocket.
On the eleventh day, the Ministry Officer arrives. He smells like steamed buns and potatoes and tells us we will be relocated to the countryside, to a work camp where we can see our father. He tells us we have been pronounced unworthy as citizens of the city. We will be re-educated. He lifts the black cloth from our mother’s picture, studies her face closely, covers it again. He asks if anyone has spoken to us or given us food. Tomorrow he will return to take us to the train. He leaves a bag of steamed buns. After he’s gone Mei Lin kneels by the low table near the wall where the covered picture of our mother hangs. She takes a bun from the sack, splits the plump dough with her fingers. Salted pork. We eat it greedily.
Before we leave our house we make small blanket packs bound with rope which we’ll carry on our backs. I fold my test papers carefully, put them in my undershirt, against my chest. Before we leave our house, we make a pail fire, burn our mother’s clothes, our father’s belt, the tablecloth, baskets, a hairbrush, the curtains, anything that can burn. We burn our own possessions, the wooden spoon dolls we shared, so as to leave nothing for our neighbors who are no longer our friends. We burn our mother’s picture. We don’t need her picture because we have her in our mouths. We burn these things because we know they would be taken from us. We take them from ourselves and leave nothing but ashes.
On the train, a day and night and day again spent in an empty wood-sided grain car. No seats, only our blanket packs, our hands on our knees. I have my tests, Mei Lin’s tooth in my pocket, my mother in my mouth. Thirty-six hours in the roofless car, Mei Lin holds me. Her breath wets the crook of my neck, and then chills. We fold into each other like birds, press our chests together against the cold, our arms inside each other’s coats, lacing our legs. Our faces tucked into each other’s necks. I tell Mei Lin how happy our father’s face will be when he sees us. The thump of rail ties hammers our spines. Teeth nail our tongues when we try to eat or speak. And then morning.
An officer opens the grain car. The sky is a haze of imminent snow and the wind picks up, lifting the hems of our coats. He tells us it is thirteen miles to the camp. Today is the thirteenth day. The officer has a donkey but he will not let us ride it, we have to run alongside. He swats at the donkey with a stick. When we are too slow he swats us. The wind pitches high whistles as it moves sharply through naked trees. Our socks are frozen in our boots, soon we can no longer feel our feet. Mei Lin stumbles often. It is as if we are walking on our anklebones.
A goods wagon comes alongside us and I ask him to let us ride, but the officer swats my mouth with his stick. My lips are frozen and the sting cracks the skin. Mei Lin stands against me as we lean into the wind. Her breath is ragged, and thick mucky sounds brew deep in her breast. The goods wagon drives on. My eyelashes are crusted thick with snow. I watch the wagon rock into the distance through the scruffy thicket of my lashes.
At the very edge of the territory we come to a small devastation. In a blue evening hour, in frost, a man whose clothes have been torn from him lies unburied, his feet gnawed to stumps, his root exposed, curled against him. He lies on his back, his legs bent underneath him, as though he had been struck down while standing his ground, his eyes and mouth scoured by birds. Mei Lin sways against me, her eyes shut, says, It’s not our father. I cannot feel my test papers scratch against the frozen bones so near the skin but I know they do. When Mei Lin coughs, blood leaks from her nose, runs in the fissures around her cracked mouth.
We arrive with the blizzard. A barn is the only building we see. The officer leaves us there to sleep with the donkey. The blizzard blows ghosts through boards, rattles the doors. The donkey lies on his side and we against his belly. I remove our boots, pick away our frozen socks ground into our raw feet, cover us with dry straw. We feed the last pieces of bun into each other’s mouths. Mei Lin’s lips are blue, her forehead hot. When she rests her head on the donkey’s haunch I wring the wet blanket so drops fall into her open mouth.
After a storm that blackened the stars, after a night that leaves Mei Lin’s skin the color of robin’s eggs, it is the fourteenth day. I walk from the barn where my sister lies against the donkey because I cannot look at her breast, though I know it is still moving. I stand in an open field in cool clear winter light. I hold my test papers. I read the one hundred percent marks. Math. Chinese. I tell myself the secrets I can no longer not tell myself: that I will not see my father again, because I have already seen him for the last time, heaped up, struck down, unburied in frost. That Mei Lin might die. Because she’s weak and no matter what I do, she is weaker. That it is fourteen days since Officers came, and it is my birthday. From across the field, a crow flies toward me, swift, its caw-caw bearing down. The fourteenth day, and I am seven and there is no one to remember or congratulate me except my mother’s tongue eaten by my father, their blood mixed and burned to ashes rubbed in my skin. I give myself a present, Mei Lin’s tooth from my pocket, and I swallow it. I have survived this far. My mother’s voice leaps like a tongue of fire from my mouth: Congratulations to myself. It echoes, ricochets along the barn walls, is gathered, carried in the crow’s wings thwumping across the field.
Julianne Ortale lives in West Hollywood, California. “The People’s Youth” is her first published story in a national literary magazine.