“You are hungry.” Prisoner Tao’s voice was gentle. His accent was from the south. He spoke the Mandarin words as if they were part of his second language.
In the dim light Fong looked at the young man’s face. The smooth skin. The clear eyes.
Fong’s time in prison had taught him to mind his own business, to deal with his own problems – to be alone. That proffered friendship and a warden’s snitch were often one and the same. But something else said talk to this boy. Comfort him. He is important to you.
“You are not from here.”
“No, from Sichuan province.”
Fong had never been to that part of the country. “How did you get here?”
“They brought me.”
“Why?”
The young man looked sharply at Fong. “Have you been sent here to torment me at the end? Is this the final insult?”
“No.” A long silence ensued.
At last Fong spoke. “I have no way of proving that to you.” Fong gave him back the remainder of the rice. “Thank you for your food.”
A silence grew like a dark cloud between them. Finally the young man pointed to Fong’s shackles. “Do they hurt?”
Fong snapped back. “Yes. Of course they hurt. They were made to hurt. They are intended to hurt. They put them on me to hurt.” Why was he being hard on this boy? He was about to apologize when the young man turned away and, stretching his long arms along the wall, tilted his head so it rested against the cool stone.
“It’s all intended isn’t it, Traitor Zhong?” He turned to Fong and there were tears in his eyes.
“Yes, it’s all planned,” Fong answered slowly.
“So I’m just part of their plan?”
For the first time it occurred to Fong that this young man’s death may have been specifically designed for him to witness – to learn from. To remind him who was in charge in China. He wanted to get up and yell through the bars that it wasn’t necessary. That he acknowledged that they owned him. That there was no reason for this object lesson. That it was sinful to execute a boy to prove a point to him.
But he didn’t. He sank to the floor and hung his head.
Later that night, Fong awoke to the boy’s gentle crying. No words were spoken, but the two came together. The boy’s head rested in Fong’s lap and Fong ran his fingers through the young man’s greasy hair until finally the youth’s breathing deepened and sleep took him.
Fong sat in the darkness and allowed himself, just for a moment, the grace of thinking of himself as the boy’s father.
Then lines – favourite lines of his dead wife, Fu Tsong – came to him:
Fong traced the beauty of the young man’s face with his fingers – and remembered. On his release from Ti Lan Chou political prison and his banishment to internal exile beyond the Wall, the authorities had allowed Fong three hours in Shanghai to collect his things. They knew he’d return to the two rooms at the Shanghai Theatre Academy where he and his wife had lived.
When he opened the door he was shocked to find the rooms empty. Unoccupied rooms in Shanghai were rarer than shrimp in shrimp dumplings. At first he was unable to enter. All the furniture was gone. The walls were bare. Everything that was “them” was gone. How small rooms appeared when emptied of their lives.
In the bathroom he found the only vestige of Fu Tsong – her Complete Works of Shakespeare. It was open on the cracked tile. The ammonia smell of urine rose from the still damp pages.
He had clutched the book to his chest for the entire seven-day, hard-seat train journey to the west.
When he finally arrived on the edges of the Chinese known world, the party man who met his train assigned him the “job” of head constable, gave him a ration card and pointed to a mud-floored hut. Then he gave Fong papers to sign and departed, all with a bare minimum of talk. Eyes watched Fong as he moved in the small village. They all knew who he was – the traitor from the hated city of Shanghai.
Silence was his constant companion. When work ended, the real punishment began – boredom. He had nothing to do. Nothing to read. Nothing to see. He wasn’t permitted beyond the village’s outer perimeter and he, of course, had no means of leaving. The nights seemed to grow longer and longer.
In those tedious hours, he’d taken to devising ways of hiding Fu Tsong’s Complete Works of Shakespeare. She’d treasured the collection with its Mandarin translation. Now it was his. Now he treasured it. It was his last link to their life together. He understood that the authorities had allowed him to keep the book only so there was still one more thing they could take from him. It was a potent weapon.
He initially thought of hiding the book in the village. Quickly he gave up that idea. They’d find it even if he buried it deep in the ground. It was only when he was mending his torn Mao jacket with the needle and thread he’d been given as part of his twice-yearly household rations that he landed on a solution.
Every night by candlelight in the cold of his hut, he’d carefully cut single pages from the text. Then he sewed them together, the bottom of the first page to the top of the second. He found he could manage between fifteen and twenty pages before the rationed candle began to splutter. Once he saw the light start to give out, he’d pick open the stitches of his padded Mao jacket’s lining and insert the pages into the pockets that he had sewn there.
Chinese characters are much more compact than English sentences. A hundred-page play in English could be as few as twenty pages in Mandarin. So coping with Shakespeare’s works in the Common Speech was not too time-consuming and more important, when carefully smoothed and inserted into the pouches beneath his coat’s lining, the pages were not noticeable beneath the jacket’s padding. But Fong’s English was very good and he was loath to give up any of the original versions of the plays. He understood, though, that trying to keep all the plays could endanger the entire enterprise. So he’d have to choose. Which plays? The answer came to him one night. It was simple. He’d keep the English language versions of the plays in which his wife had performed. Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, Othello, Hamlet and Pericles. The rest, the ones she hadn’t brought to life for him, he’d leave behind. Measure for Measure had been one of her favourites and she had insisted that he memorize many of the speeches from the play.
Fu Tsong often sought his help with new roles. She found his didactic approach to the plays helpful. Over and over again he looked at plot twists and specific lines as a detective would the layout of a crime scene. Why would someone say that at that exact moment? Doesn’t her saying that imply that she knows this? Why would he go there rather than here? His most crucial insights were about what was missing from a scene or a character. What wasn’t said or done told him more than what was. His interpretations were occasionally difficult for Fu Tsong to incorporate, but from time to time they were invaluable. In the case of her Isabella in Measure for Measure, they formed the basis for one of her most famous performances.