Parishioners and Other Stories. Joseph Dylan

nurses, she was the only one who hadn’t really settled down and started a family. At twenty-eight, only Li Li was younger than Zhang Heng. Li Li was fresh out of nursing school with no experience overseas like the rest of the nurses at the International Medical Centre. Traditionally, by the time they were in their mid-twenties, most Chinese women were married. Most Chinese women were married and most of them had had the one child the government allowed them under the One-Child Policy. As desperate as she was to get out of China, Zhang Heng was only slightly less desperate to get married, to get married and have a child. Women not much older than her already considered themselves middle-aged spinsters if they had not yet found a husband. So far, for Zhang Heng, marriage just had not been in the cards. It was neither her personality nor her looks. Warm, but more than a little wary of people, Zhang Heng was a woman who seldom quarreled or found fault with anyone. Nor did they easily find fault with her. Her large, luminous, dark eyes, which she highlighted with thick eyeliner, peered out shamelessly above sculpted cheekbones on a face with a flawless, pale complexion. Up until two months ago, she was seeing an engineer. That had lasted over a year. Suddenly, without much explanation, he returned to the woman he had been seeing before he became involved with Zhang Heng. Before him, she there had been a graduate student in history at Peking University whom she expected to marry. That, too, came to an abrupt end that she never fully understood. Following both break-ups, she spent a day or two at home. She stayed in her pajamas and crawled into bed. Pulling up the down comforter over her head, she silently wept until the tears would no longer come. Once they ceased to flow, she never cried over either one of them again. What was over was over. If her colleagues suspected that her personal relationships had run aground on the shoals of life, they would not suspect it from her demeanor, for she kept up with her work as she always had: cheerfully, efficiently, competently.

      More than having a husband, more than having a family, Zhang Heng wanted out of the Middle Kingdom. For Zhang Heng, there was no true freedom in China. There was no true promise of happiness, no way to truly be herself. That she had no husband was perhaps fortunate for Zhang Heng, for one would have only tied her down to her homeland. Just where and when she decided on joining the diaspora of China, she didn’t know. Nor did she know how abruptly she had come to the decision. She just knew she did. She wanted this no less than a caged dog wanted out of the confinement of its pen. If she were to reflect upon it, she believed she had nursed this desire ever since she was a girl growing up in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, the westernmost province in China. Born in a small village in Hebei Province in eastern China, her family was physically uprooted during the Cultural Revolution. For a Chinese family at this time, it was not an unusual predicament. Ninety percent of the Chinese who lived in China were Han Chinese. In an attempt to dilute out the minorities that inhabited the hinterlands, the government deported many of the Han Chinese living in the interior to the outlying provinces. One day, when Zhang Heng was a girl no more than five years of age, her father, Zhang Bo, received a notice from the government social bureau informing him that his family was to be resettled in Xinjiang Province. Xinjiang, in the northwest corner of China, was clear across the country from Hebei. With the notice came no specific destination. The People’s Party of the Republic of China just ordered Zhang Bo and his family to report to the social services department in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province within two weeks. There, he and his family would be informed as to where they were to move. With the note, came passes for the entire family for the train to Urumqi.

      Clutching her favorite rag doll in her left hand, as she held her father’s hand in her right, she remembered boarding the dusty, rancid, ancient train that paralleled the Silk Road as it headed west for Xinjiang Province. The railcar was full of similar families being expelled from the heartland of China. Every so often, she remembered her father taking out the letter from the resettlement board and glancing at it as though he hoped he had somehow misread it, somehow there’d been a mistake. Lacking a berth on the train, she nodded off and on in the crook of her father’s arm, as they sat on the foam bench covered in torn, shabby, black vinyl, while the train slowly inched its way across northern China. In front of them, on a similar railcar bench, sat her mother and her older sister, Hui. After a couple of days of circumnavigating the northern stretches of Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province, the train entered the vast arid, rippling plains of Xinjiang Province. Eventually, they arrived in Urumqi. After the train spat them out into the railway terminal, Zhang Heng and her family spent the night in restless sleep on the worn, wooden benches of the lobby of the Social Services Bureau for Xinjiang Province. There, the following day, an official, a middle-aged bureaucrat wearing metal-rimmed glasses that slouched down on his blunt, narrow nose, and a single, white hair protruding from the mole on his bald pate, informed her father that the family was to be resettled on a collective farm outside the city of Kashgar, the western terminus of the Silk Road in China. The official handed her father a document with his chop on it.

      There was no more to be said in the matter. It was all official. The chop made it so.

      In Kashgar, still clutching the doll in her hand, the family, with their precious few belongings tucked into a couple of pieces of weathered leather luggage, was transferred to a large, blue, flatbed truck. Sitting on their luggage in the back of the truck, they made their way to the collective farm with two other Han Chinese families from Hebei Province that had met a the same fate as her own. The collective farm was an hour outside Kashgar, down a rutted, gravel road. The memory of the jarring truck ride, along with the train journey, were among the memories that stuck with her of the Cultural Revolution. More than these memories, she recalled the few occasions during the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guard confronted her father as he returned from the fields. Making up some excuse or other, they pummeled him, kicking and striking him till he was prostrate on the ground, his nose and mouth bleeding from their blows. The first time, her mother tried to intervene. Members of the Red Guard, no older than teenagers, spat upon her mother and shoved her to the ground. The attacks of the Red Guard were quick, vicious, efficient, and thoroughly humiliating. They were equally as baffling, coming from no undue neglect of the rules or any intransigence on her father’s or her family’s part. But little during the Cultural Revolution little made sense. It made no sense to her parents, their coworkers on the farm, or to the multitudes of the Chinese wherever they lived. It didn’t have to. It just was.

      On the collective farm, the seasons came and went by slowly for Heng and her sister, Hui. The summers on the desert could be blazingly hot, heat waves shimmering above the brown and red parched earth; the winters bitterly cold with the cold breath of frigid, Siberian winds seeping through the chinks of the clapboard walls of the modest dormitory where the Party housed her family. While her parents toiled in the fields of wheat and hay and barley, she and her sister attended class in the one large room of the collective farm in the same brick building as the cafeteria. Too young to work alongside their parents, the children of the collective farm were taught to speak and write Mandarin, taught to calculate mathematical problems, taught geography, while at the same time being inculcated into the correct way of political thinking. During the Cultural Revolution, no one was too young not to be imbued with the teachings of the Great Leader.

      Then, like a slowly receding tide retreating from the shingle, the Cultural Revolution withdrew. It withdrew and never came back. Having imploded upon itself, the Red Guard, whose sole existence was to carry out the policies of the Cultural Revolution, disbanded. Life returned to some sense of normalcy for her family and the millions of Chinese who had endured the years of turmoil and upheaval. Following its demise, her father petitioned and received permission from the local Party leader of the collective farm to leave if he so desired. For months, her father looked for work elsewhere. Finally, finding a job in a factory that manufactured farming implements in Kashgar, Zhang Bo moved his family to Kashgar where they found a small two-bedroom apartment in the ancient part of the city. Unable to find more gainful employment, her mother took in laundry and labored as a seamstress. In winter sitting by the stove, and in summer sitting by the open door to catch a refreshing breeze, her mother sewed with her needle and thread under the dim light of a sixty watt bulb that dangled from the ceiling. There, in the dim light, her mother slowly stitched together the dresses and blouses for the neighborhood women, who often paid her in live chickens or freshly-laid eggs.

      With her father employed at the local factory, it was time for Zhang Heng and Zhang Hui to enter middle school. Holding hands, Heng and Hui, walked the six blocks together to the school.