P’an felt agitated. She was worn out. It was natural. How was a child like that supposed to cope with such infernal labor?
From that day on, they met infrequently. Only at group meetings. She studied as diligently as ever. But you could see that something inside her had snapped. He tried talking to her. Her responses were evasive. She was tired. And in a hurry. She had a smaller female workers’ group next. She couldn’t be late – everyone was exhausted. He couldn’t get any more out of her.
Until suddenly – a great and unexpected joy. Delivered by the newspapers. A workers’ revolution in Russia. Power was in the hands of the soviets. The Communists were in the vanguard. If only they’d hold out! A socialist workers’ state right next door – this was a powerful ally! With this thought in mind, it was easier to work, to bear the failures, discrimination, and the pulverizing, inhuman oppression.
Months passed.
In the factory the work progressed quickly. There were already three older workers’ groups. He had no one to help him. Everything on his own. He could hardly keep up. He had to shelve his own studies for the time being.
In spite of it all, when alone at night he would secretly yearn for his old conversations with Chen, for her bright and trusting eyes, for the soft exaltation of her voice.
Then one evening – a few months had slipped by unnoticed – as he was leaving he saw some workers congregating in the courtyard. He went over and asked what had happened.
“A spool worker drowned… in the well…”
He shuddered. Pushing aside the gawkers, he squeezed in closer. His heart drummed an alarm. He recognized her from afar. There she lay, tiny, her face bruised and swollen. In her half-open eyes – the terror of a child.
He roamed the streets late into the night, shaken to the bone, vainly trying to unravel this grim puzzle. What could have happened? How could he not have noticed anything, not have taken care of her, not stopped her?
Late that night he returned to his room feeling a mess. On the table in his room – a letter. He opened it with trembling hands.
“My dearest! Don’t condemn me for what I’ve done. The white pockmarked devil has disgraced me. He’s infected me with a terrible disease. How can I go on living? If I had confessed it to you, you might have killed him. He’ll get what he deserves, no matter what. I’ve written the authorities that he’s to blame. I’m so afraid to die! My one and only, my dearest! I love you…”
P’an raged. He dashed to the door. At the threshold he paused. Where was he going? To kill the pockmarked man? One way or the other, he’d have to wait till morning. He crouched on a sack, not bothering to get undressed. His thoughts ran in circles. And inside him – a physical, gnawing pain.
Gradually his thoughts sifted themselves from the chaos and found some precision.
Who was this pockmarked guy? A pawn. A wheel in a huge mechanism. Kill the individual? Nonsense! If an oak is blotting out the sun, why tear off an acorn? You’ve got to hack down the whole tree. Dig it up by the roots. When it falls, all the acorns will tumble to the earth. Provided he had the strength to keep hacking! Don’t give up. Become the ax himself. Whittle his hate till it was sharp as a blade and watch that it never grew blunt.
A red-hot needle of pain turned his thoughts back to Chen. Such a tiny thing! So wise! Wanted to know everything and wasn’t aware of such simple things, like the fact that only the Chinese punish those who cause a suicide. White people were above Chinese law. They scoffed at it. Who would think to punish the murderer of a tiny Chinese girl?
He squatted there till morning.
In the morning he showed up for work stiff, calm, composed. In the evening, at the group meeting, he explained things forcibly, responded precisely to questions and, feeling ten pairs of slanted eyes trained on him, reached a hard full stop:
“Death to the oppressors!”
That fall he managed to organize the first opposition in the factory. The workers sent delegates to the factory administration. To raise salaries. To abolish corporal punishment. Equal payment for the children and women who did equal work.
The delegates were beaten and thrown out of the factory. The workers responded with a strike. The administration lost their heads. They called in an army detachment. The soldiers surrounded the factory. Police arrived to dispose of the instigators. P’an Tsiang-kuei and a few other workers were arrested and taken to the police station. Their shoes were removed and their heels lashed with bamboo sticks until they fell unconscious. P’an passed out and was thrown into an isolation cell.
He broke out. He’d known beatings since childhood. They didn’t scare him. Like a cat thrown on the ground, he’d learned to land on all fours. Now it was the same. Scaling a high wall, he dusted off his clothing and, like nothing had happened, marched over to the district committee.
Then – faces, factories, cities… image after image, like a high-speed film. No way to retain it all. Groups, meetings, strikes, demonstrations, prisons. The flesh on his heels stripped to the bone. Two months in the slammer. Two death sentences. Two jailbreaks.
He joined Sun Yat-sen’s party. Took a look around. The Kuomintang was swarming with nationalist-leaning bourgeoisie. Take away the foreigners’ privileges, force them to rewrite bad treaties. Otherwise – same old story. What could P’an have in common with them? For the time being, one thing only – a common enemy, the imperialists. You’ve got to use whomever you can against them. For now they were allies. Later, it was up in the air. After the foreigners were sent packing, then maybe it would be their turn. The important thing was to forge ties with the working masses. There was always work to be done.
He had to abandon his studies. His only luxury was the newspaper. It rarely brought much comfort. More often it disturbed him. Something had gotten tangled up in the West. The Entente Cordiale had conquered Germany. Their own “socialists” had swallowed up the workers’ revolution. Something like a German Kuomintang, apparently. The winners bellowed their victory with a triumphant howl. Just watch, they’ll start pouring in again, China will be taken overnight, it’ll be flooded by swarms of new, insatiable gold diggers.
They descended. Even more brazen, even haughtier, even more bloodthirsty. A weary China greeted them with a strangled moan. But things were already seething down below. There were the first timid explosions – the hollow faraway rumble of the impending storm.
In China the air was getting thinner. White-skinned and yellow-skinned spies nipped at the heels of the Chinese like greyhounds. He had to slip out by night, sniffing out the nooks, like back in his childhood, when he had to look for rundown hovels to sleep in. It was getting harder to work. The exhaustion and sleep deprivation made his eyes fall shut, made his lashed heels ache.
Help arrived unexpectedly. Arranged by his friends. The Kuomintang was sending him and a group of students to study in Europe.
On a stuffy, sweltering evening, when the overloaded ship swayed heavily on the foam-fringed, hunched over waves, a cumbersome wardrobe carried by porters on strained backs, P’an Tsiang-kuei stood on deck, and his gaze took in the contours of his receding homeland for the final time. A lump swelled in his throat. China drifted away in the dusk like a giant galley shunted into the distance by the measured strokes of invisible oars. It seemed that at any moment the choked and protracted howl of the slant-eyed rowers, the rattle of chains, and the crack of a white slave driver’s whip would break the silence. The East was just a black smear of night. P’an leaned on the rail in a quandary. Where was that hapless country floating to? Did it have far to float in this dusk? And would it someday float off into freedom and sunshine, or was it never fated to see the long-awaited sun, whose misshapen orb the emaciated and anguished workers embroidered by night on the white flags of the Kuomintang?