At first, Ren shooed the girl away. He took her for a beggar. The way she lightly clasped his wrist and asked him who he was waiting for had seemed an irritation. He was waiting for a woman with a red scarf. The girl returned to him a few minutes later and lifted her shoulder length hair to reveal a scarf of colonial design in scrolled red roses.
‘I am Little Wu’ she announced.
Ren took her impression in. High cheekbones. Eyes that lit up dark spaces. A happy gaze that could be pulled apart and sharpened in an instant by words that made her curious. Quite a belly. One that looked about six months pregnant. Ren had no idea what to say. Little Wu gave him a chance to collect his thoughts, not through silence, but by speaking.
‘Father did not mention how I am?’ she asked, gesturing toward herself.
‘No’.
‘Will I have to cross the border alone?’
‘No’.
‘Do you feel deceived?’
‘I would not put it that way.’
Ren moved his weight from one foot to another. He finally asked: ‘are you carrying a little communist in there?’
‘I would not put it that way’ she said with mock frost. ‘I am returning to my mother's house in Canton’.
'I know'. Ren eased her little canvass knapsack off her shoulder and slung it over his.
‘I will need a receipt for that’ she informed him.
Ren smiled and held her glance. ‘Am I too lively, Brother Ren?’ she asked.
‘Is there such a thing?’ he replied.
‘Then you are not too old’ she giggled.
‘But do you think you have a chance, Brother Ren?’ she probed skipping a little as the borderline loomed closer.
‘I can see that I am falling behind you already’, he said, sounding like he was making a report on the transit of the moon.
‘So you are too old. I suspected as much’ she said, swinging her head in the opposite direction.
They paid a villager a small fee and hitched a ride on the back of a haycart heading toward the border. Little Wu pretended to study a group of rice paddy workers dividing up bunches of shoots ready for planting but quickly turned back to Ren.
‘You mean to say I am too conceited in the circumstances?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know what happened to the father.’
‘Gobbled by a rice thresher. Shot by partisans. Hung for being a bandit landlord. Died of TB. Why don’t you choose which one does the least damage to my honour?’
‘You forgot a possibility’.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Driven crazy by your questions’.
‘Oh, you should welcome my curiosity, Brother Ren.’
‘So I am not too old, Little Wu?’
It seemed to Ren that they went back and forth in this manner for unnoticed hours. They passed through the border checkpoint with no incident, across a long pedestrian bridge over a river to a world of upright propaganda signage promoting the health benefits of sweet potatoes, a street of makeshift bamboo cages awaiting new occupants, and little shops selling rice flour buns containing only pork fat and millet gruel.
Ren was dismayed. He had forgotten how much country life had slipped under the communists. There seemed to be none of the old Autumn harvest energy. No chains of red chilies or plump pond eels drying in the sun just government notices filling walls with instructions. Little Yu seemed more at ease with the sparse produce and the clutter of words. She had found her own song to follow – one Ren suspected was a tune that drowned out the world she saw.
'Aren't you appalled at everything on this side of the border?'
'Did we make it any better in our time? Did we think about these people?' she replied.
Ren was not sure he agreed. 'What you look for in your bag came to you in a sack' he offered.
Little Wu could not be much older than nineteen years of age. Yet she had become adept at making a defiant space for truth before all other thoughts. Her playfulness referred to the everyday horror of living. It was a kind of caution in her manner that supposed her anonymity, or carefully obscured feelings, might achieve as much as having the last word of an argument or launching the first words in a room struggling with silence. This made her blind to many obvious problems but also cast her in an original light as someone who thought that attesting to the truth or falsity of attempts could achieve something. Certainly something more than sheltering acceptable opinions in a sturdy byre and never leaving the farm.
'I must be giving you a grumpy impression this morning' said Ren.
'We are visitors here. They must have plenty of their own people to discourage optimism' she replied.
Despite their quarrelsome ease with each other, Ren had mistaken her manner for a lack of experience, or lack of self-belief, something he regarded as more troubling because of the way she could easily make him feel. They had only just met.
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