You knew we were homesick. One day, you heard us cursing the pork and luffa rice made by the kitchen without variation, so you taught our cook to turn his wood plane to the other side and shave potatoes with it. With a little vegetable oil, he made fried potato chips that almost tasted like our mothers’ home cooking. There was always a wooden box slung over your bike’s handlebars. We called it the treasure chest, because crazy objects popped out of it all the time. A thick prayer book was probably the only item a pastor should possess, but you also produced things like emergency medication, a pack of Camels, a tattered copy of Time magazine, a tin of chocolate toffee, a bottle of Korbel brandy, and a bag of Colombian instant coffee. To thank you for your free diagnosis and treatment, your variety of friends managed to get rare American items on the black market, things we could only get with great difficulty and danger through the Hump. You had it all, but you never hoarded it. As soon as you took it with your left hand, your right hand was passing it along to us. In your treasure chest, you sometimes hid a few packs of condoms, since you’d occasionally seen women coming in and out of our dorm. You worried we couldn’t stand the isolation and loneliness of Yuehu and would defy orders and head into town on our own, looking for some fun. If we got into trouble there, it could cost us our lives. The Japanese offered a reward for any American soldier participating in covert missions. Instead of losing our lives that way, you figured you might as well let us stay in our little nest, committing minor sins that God could forgive later. Every Sunday, when you saw us dressed up and sitting in church to pray, you smiled like a child. If someone missed a Sunday, you just shook your head and clicked your tongue.
You troubled yourself over our lives and souls every day, so even though you never saw the battlefield with us, you’re my comrade, and they aren’t.
I know you’ve been waiting for me for fifty-two years. No—for Pastor Billy, it’s been seventy. I understand your impatience, even anger. But life and death aren’t in our control. Just as you prayed to God to give you a few more years, Pastor Billy, I repeatedly prayed he would give me a quick death. When I turned seventy-two, and my wife left this world, she took with her my passion for life. At eighty-four, I fell in the bathroom and was taken to the veterans hospital in Detroit. I had a brain hemorrhage, paralysis, and aphasia, but no memory loss. I never again left the hospital. From my bed, I asked God again and again, “Why keep my body imprisoned here on death row, but let my brain stay alert?” But fate’s detonator wasn’t in my hands, and I couldn’t determine when it would go off. Just as fate punished you with an early death, it taunted me with mere survival, leaving me bedridden for another ten years.
Actually, I could have lived even longer. As my muscles no longer listened to my brain, my body’s energy consumption was compressed into the smallest possible space, like an oil lamp with its wick turned very low, which, though it is nearly dark, burns on for a long time.
That is, I could have gone on living—if it weren’t for that uninvited guest.
One day, when I’d been at the veterans hospital for ten years, the nurse told me there was a woman named Catherine Yao there who wanted to see me. I scoured the list of relatives and friends I could still remember. Her name wasn’t there. Both my sons had passed on before me, and my daughter had moved to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil with her husband fifteen years earlier. When you live to be nearly a century old, your greatest blessing is that you’ve attended the funeral of nearly everyone you know. Your greatest sorrow is that they can’t repay the respect you’ve shown them. They won’t, or rather can’t, come to your funeral. They not only won’t be at your funeral but also won’t visit you. I had almost no visitors in my ward during those years, aside from my social worker. After a long time in speech therapy, my ability to speak had been partially restored, but I had few people to talk to. Oh, I wished to exchange the regained freedom from my tongue for my body. A ninety-four-year-old man has far fewer opportunities to use his tongue than his hands or his feet. So on that particular day, I didn’t hesitate to agree to see this woman named Catherine. I was lonely, and I wanted to talk to someone from the outside world, even if she was a stranger.
It was a damp day near the end of July and unseasonably cold. Raindrops drew line after line of tears on my windowpane, making the dahlias outside as blurred as a Monet. She walked in and stood next to my bed, silently looking at my thin face collapsed against my pillow. She wore an exquisite cloth hat and an equally exquisite windbreaker. I couldn’t tell her age from her features, but the gray curly hair slipping out from under the brim of her hat and her slightly stooped shoulders in the windbreaker made me think she stood somewhere in the hazy zone between middle and old age.
No matter how much she’d changed, I recognized her immediately, even though it was a full twenty-three years since the winter I’d chased her down the street in front of my house. At that time, she wasn’t called Catherine. Maybe Catherine was the name she’d taken to adapt to the environment. During those twenty-three years, there wasn’t a single day that I didn’t regret my actions that day. I felt my wife’s death and my illness were God’s enduring punishment. During those twenty-three years, I’d never stopped looking for her. I sent a notice to the missing persons column in the newspaper and broadcasted requests for information about her on the radio. I contacted old comrades in Naval Group China and even relevant Chinese government departments inquiring after her whereabouts, but it was all useless. She seemed to have completely vanished from the world.
I hadn’t expected to see her again. And then, when I’d given up all hope, she delivered herself, standing right there before my eyes.
“Wende. You look like Wende,” I mumbled.
I was equally stunned to find that after a decade of paralysis, a finger on my right hand suddenly began to twitch.
She understood me. I saw moisture gathering in her eyes. She didn’t reach for her handkerchief or a tissue, wanting to ignore the tears. She simply pretended to tidy her hat, tilting her head back slightly, forcing the tears to retreat as she did. Then she cleared her throat and, speaking each word deliberately, said, “I don’t know . . . any Wende.”
She took a beautifully printed business card from the pocket of her delicate coat and placed it on my bed. She said she was a reporter from a well-known Chinese media outlet in Washington, DC. On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of victory in the anti-Japanese war, they wanted to interview veterans of the US military who’d served in China and compile a commemorative album. She found my name in an old directory of Naval Group China in the Library of Congress.
Her English had improved a good deal in these twenty-three years. If she didn’t drag a sentence out, it was nearly flawless, though she did occasionally turn “thank you” into “sank you.” Her tone spoke of the capability and experience of a well-trained journalist, solid and stable, with almost no crack of emotion. She pinned me in her sight firmly, and even if she didn’t speak, I knew who was in control here.
I suddenly understood the purpose of her visit. She wanted me to know that she knew my whereabouts before I died, and that no matter where I went, she forever held my guilt in her grasp. She wore her full armor and kept the polite distance of a stranger, letting me know she had erased all trace of me from her memory. She hated me, but not with the sort of hate that could be expressed in words. Hate that can find expression is not hate. Hate must come to the end of its own rope before being forgotten.