“Yes, Lieutenant,” I replied. My father had written twice, both letters brief, saying that he and my mother were well and that they hoped I was, too.
“Why are you unhappy?”
“Unhappy, Lieutenant?”
“What’s bothering you?”
“I don’t understand the question, Lieutenant.”
“Did you break up with your boyfriend?” Lieutenant Wei said.
“I have never had a boyfriend, Lieutenant,” I said. I would rather she had ripped my book and sent me back to the barracks with a week of cleaning duty at the pigsties.
“When I enlisted,” Lieutenant Wei said, “my boyfriend saw me off at the train station and then sent a letter to the training camp to break up with me. The first letter I got in the camp. I was much younger than you are now. I was fourteen and a half. He was eighteen, and he did not have the courage to say it to my face. You think it’s the end of the world, but it is not. The army is a good place to sort these things out.”
I wondered if other girls, for different misdemeanors, were kept hostage at odd hours in this room and informed of the love history of Lieutenant Wei. It was ludicrous of her, I decided, to think that any unhappiness could be explained by a breakup; more ludicrous if she thought she could, by recounting her own story of triumph over heartbreak, lessen other people’s pain.
“Apparently you have no interest in this discussion about feelings,” Lieutenant Wei said.
“I do my best to summarize my feelings in my ideological reports, Lieutenant,” I said. Every Sunday night, we read our weekly reports at the squad meeting. I always began mine that in the past week I had kept up my faith in Communism and my love of our motherland; I filled the rest of the page with military and political slogans that not even Major Tang could find fault with. I had been criticized by our squad leader for being insincere in my reports, so I learned to add personal touches. “In the past week I have continued my efforts to understand the invincibility of Marxism,” and “In the coming week I will work on The Communist Manifesto.”
Lieutenant Wei sighed. “I’m not talking about the feelings in your ideological reports.”
“I don’t have much feeling about most people, Lieutenant,” I said. There had not been a boyfriend and perhaps there never would be one — the man who had not wiped away my tears under the wisteria trellis had later done so, repeatedly, when my memories were revised into dreams, and he who had chosen not to claim the love had left no space for others to claim it: In high school there had been a boy or two, like there is a boy or two for most girls during those years, but I had returned their letters in new envelopes, never adding a line, thinking that would be enough to end what should not have been started.
Without a word Lieutenant Wei put the book in her drawer. I wondered how Professor Shan would have felt had she known that her beloved book had fallen into the hands of someone who, in her mind, was ill-educated. I felt a slight, vindictive joy, directed both at Professor Shan and at myself.
I saluted Lieutenant Wei’s back when I was dismissed, but before I opened her door she told me in an urgent tone to come back. We stood in front of her window, huge flakes of snow faling in the windless night. In a hushed voice, as if it were a secret that we needed to keep between us, she said without turning to me, “You know, I’ve never seen real snow.”
THE SNOW CONTINUED falling the next morning, bringing a festive mood to the camp. It was the first snow many of the locals had ever seen, and the weatherman had forecast a record storm, more snow than in one hundred and twenty years, if not longer. The officers’ orders came as though from a faraway land, their shrill whistles marking our military routines muffled. At formation drill, we marched with less resolve, the ground becoming more and more plush by the hour. A huge snowman was erected in front of the mess hall by the cooking squad, his straw hat almost touching the eaves; a squad of smaller snowmen were installed next to the pigsties, in perfect formation.
The wind picked up in the evening, and by the next day the snow was more of a concern than a marvel. It did not stop until the end of the third day. The temperature had fallen sharply. There was no heating in the camp, and most of the pipes were frozen. The cooking squad, who kept the big stove burning, managed to have running water in the kitchen, and each of us was rationed a basin of water. In the mornings we broke the ice on the surface to clean our faces.
Ping was the first in our squad to develop frostbite, which in a day or two affected all of us, on our cheeks and ears, hands and feet. None of us, after days of marching in the snow, had dry shoes or socks.
The snowstorm had turned us quiet; talking seemed to require extra energy that we did not possess. On the evening of the third day, while we were waiting for the dinner whistle, Ping reread her father’s letter from the previous week — the snowstorm had stopped the post, and the weekly letter from Ping’s father, precise as clockwork, had not come — and announced that she was not crying not because there was nothing to cry about, but because tears would do more damage to her already swollen cheeks. Nan smiled, then sang us a folk song in which a girl named Little Cabbage loses her mother during her infancy and goes on to suffer a long and painful life under the reign of a cruel stepmother and spoiled half brother.
“We Little Cabbages should unite and take our fates into our own hands,” Ping said after Nan finished the song. “I have an idea: We should pair up and share beds at night.”
The most miserable time of the past few days had been crawling under the ice-cold quilt. Most of us went to bed wearing layers of clothes. Still, a small shift in position would cause one’s arm or leg to come into contact with the cold sheet; we dared not move in our sleep, and as a result woke up with cramped muscles.
Ping began telling a story that she said she had read in Reader’s Digest. A priest, having arrived in the Canadian wilderness, was assigned a young local girl as a guide for his journey to his post, and when the two were stranded in a shed by a snowstorm, the girl discovered that she had forgotten to bring a flint and tinder. At night, it was so cold that they were in danger of freezing to death, so the girl suggested that they sleep together to keep each other warm. “Of course the priest, who had never been close to a young woman, fell in love when the girl wrapped them up together in a blanket. He never reached his destination but married the girl. Years later, she told him that she had lied — a local girl, she would never have forgotten the flint and tinder,” Ping said, for a moment looking alive and happy. “Imagine that!”
Lieutenant Wei might not allow us to share beds, our squad leader said. Why not? Ping asked, and said that Lieutenant Hong had begun sleeping in Lieutenant Wei’s bed. “They’re cold, too.”
“How did this discovery occur?” Nan asked, and winked at me as if she and I had access to some secret knowledge that was denied Ping. She was on the way to the restroom a couple of nights ago, Ping said, when she saw Lieutenant Hong sneak into Lieutenant Wei’s room. “They didn’t see me, of course,” Ping said. “But think about it. It makes sense, no? Two bodies are better than one in this cold weather.”
Two girls whose beds were across the aisle nodded at each other and asked the squad leader to pair them up. The squad leader said that she would have to report to Lieutenant Wei, and five minutes later returned with the official permission. Should we draw lots every night? Ping asked, becoming more excited about her idea. We could spend the day guessing who we would sleep with at night, she said; suspense would make the time go faster.