An Excerpt from The Rusticated
BY LU HAN
Jilin Province, China
January 1968
When Ling sensed a familiar warmth spreading on soft cotton beneath her, she was still suspended in a dream. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to go back to sleep, but it was too late. She had once again wet the bed. At twelve years old, Ling was well past the age when this was acceptable. She only had one thought: she must not wake her father.
The moon was strong that night. Despite the drifting clouds, its light shone through the dusty windows, reflecting off the fresh snow on the ground. Ling lifted herself up and looked around at the dark silhouettes in the room. If she remained still, she could hear her younger sister, Lan, breathing softly next to her. The wind picked up, ushering the clouds along and rattling the windows. On the small cot across the room her father slept, feet pointed towards the window and wrapped tightly in blankets. Ling could just make out the tip of his nose, the outline of his lower jaw, his slightly parted mouth. His face bore a mild resemblance to that of Chairman Mao’s, whose statue was erected in Changchun’s central marketplace earlier that year, bronze-set expression serious and unsmiling.
Ling sat up fully and heaved the wool blanket off. Her urine had begun to grow cold and she wanted out of the damp sheets. Quietly, she swung her feet over the cot, toes hovering above the slippers.
Please.
She did not think to ask God to stop her father from waking up because she had not yet heard of such a thing. Instead she prayed to what she could see around her. She prayed to the room she had grown up in, the same one she lived in with her family for all twelve years of her life. She prayed to the pots hanging on metal hooks, to the splintered wooden furniture, to the moon tucked low in the sky. She begged them to keep her father asleep, just this one time.
Ling peeled back the quilt from the corner of the bed, careful not to touch the soaked area. Beside her, Lan stirred and mumbled to the air. Ling could see her sister’s eyes were still swollen from crying the entire evening.
Earlier in the day, their father took the tiny black cat they had only gotten a week ago and, without a word, grabbed her by the neck and threw her out the window. From their second-floor apartment they could hear her cries as she scampered around the courtyard, looking for an open door, a shed, any crevice to escape the brutal cold that gripped northeast China this time of year. It was a quick few minutes before they no longer heard any mewling. Through sobs, Lan asked their mother if Xiao Hu was dead and frozen by now, like the mice they found curled in the corners of the courtyard. Their mother kept her eyes cast downward, her only response to continue swishing her hands in the pot, rinsing and re-rinsing uncooked rice.
It was Ling who spoke up.
“Mei mei, Little Tiger will be alright. She is probably back with the Wu’s.” Ling pulled Lan close to her and smoothed her hair.
“They have more mice than we do,” she continued. “Can we blame her for going to them? The Wu children have chubbier cheeks that the mice like better.”
Ling pinched her sister’s cheek, finally drawing out a tiny smile. Ling would take it—she would take any bit of relief she could find for Lan.
A week earlier, Lan jolted the family awake in the middle of the night, her shrieks piercing the veil of Ling’s deepest sleep. In the dark, a mouse had found its way onto her bed, nibbling at Lan’s lip as she edged on consciousness. The next day Ling marched to the Wu’s in the neighboring complex with a small sack of cabbage-stuffed baozi and returned with a tiny ball of fur tucked into the crook of her elbow, a feisty runt that seemed to pick Ling as much as Ling chose her.
Ling allowed Lan to choose the name, and so she was called Xiao Hu. Little Tiger. They watched her bound from one corner of the room to another, seemingly more curious than predatory upon encountering a mouse. Ling worried that Xiao Hu’s killer instincts would never emerge, but since she joined their family Lan slept more easily, pulling the small warm creature into her arms each night. Ling watched the two curled into each other, sound asleep, and felt a swell of pride in her chest knowing she did this for her sister.
But that was yesterday.
Today Xiao Hu was gone and Lan had finally, mercifully, found her way to sleep. The smile Ling wrestled earlier from her sister had long faded. Lan’s lips were dry, her cheeks tender and salt-streaked in the moonlight. Ling wrenched her eyes away from her sister’s face, so small and perfectly oval. There was nothing she could do for her now.
Now Ling needed to focus on the task at hand. She bundled the bedsheets in her arms and made her way towards the washbin. She stood on her toes and reached the shelf for a bar of soap. Once she washed the sheets, she would refill their water barrel with the spigot down the hallway. Ladle by ladle Ling filled the washbin, so quietly she could barely hear a splash. She was nearly done.
And then—a great loud clatter as the ladle was snatched from her hand and flung across the room, water splattering all around the tub, soaking her face and the long, threadbare shirt that served as her nightgown as she knelt, frozen in place, her mouth open and soundless as a fish gasping on land.
“Ling!”—her father’s voice a bellow in her bones—“have you dirtied your bed again?”
Her father’s iron grip clamped her upper arm, yanked her roughly from the ground. She scrambled to get to her feet, clawing at the sink, the wall, the doorframe, anything to regain her footing.
“You disgusting. Useless. Filthy. Dog.”
Ling’s father dragged her to the door, threw it open, and shoved her to the hallway where she stumbled and fell upon her knees. Splotches of oil ringed the floors of the hallway where each family made meals just outside their apartments. The door slammed shut behind her. From the first floor the wind howled and whipped its way up the stairs and throughout the building, piercing every bit of Ling’s skin.
Ling hurried to a nook in the hallway. It offered no shelter from the cold, only a slight respite from the wind. It would have to be enough. There she huddled, wrapping herself with the soaked bedsheet she realized she still clutched in her hands.
When dawn came the sun rose weak and filtered. In the gray spill of light, the metal door creaked open a sliver. From the corner of her muted vision, Ling saw her sister emerge, eyes frantic as she darted into the hall. Lan ran to her, sobs wracking her tiny frame, trying and failing to gather Ling into her thin arms.
Ling did not shiver. Her entire body numb, skin no longer screaming, she rose slowly, serenely even, as though woken from a midday nap, until she stood upright, stiff as a stalk of corn, jaw clenched and lips the deep purple of bruised plums. She steeled herself as she walked slowly towards the doorway. The sudden return to warmth would hurt the most.
***
Ling did not always fear her father.
When she was eight and Lan was four, her father went to work in his uniform every day, with no time off except during the New Year when everything shut down for two weeks. He went about his business without two unnecessary words to spare, yet she never flinched when he walked by. He put on his uniform with great precision, taking care to smooth the stiff padded shoulders of his jacket and adjust his collar, impeccably clean and embroidered with mirroring red flags featuring a centered yellow star.
In those days their father regularly stopped by Brother Yu’s Apothecary & Goods on his way home, picking up dried plum and salted orange peels for Ling and Lan, dropping them wordlessly beside them as they played with dolls—old pieces of cloth rolled up and tied with string to create a head, a torso, a lower body. Scents of dried bark and herbs lingered in his wake, traces of apothecary clinging stubbornly to his uniform.
At four years old Lan was absorbed with her cloth dolls, giving them names, family roles, destinies and legacies, as she chattered her way into language and meaning-making. Ling supervised, encouraging her sister’s imaginative benevolence over her doll kingdom, but she was rarely a true participant. She preferred to let her gaze wander towards the window to the movements in the courtyard below, catching glimpses of their neighbors carrying their rations, scurrying, always scurrying, cloth bags clutched tightly to their chests.
As soon as Ling learned to ride a bicycle and could borrow one from Jiayu, her classmate who lived in the next building, she headed to the address stamped on the apothecary’s brown bags, eager to see this place of mysterious scents with her own eyes. She quickly became familiar with the store’s haunts—the cluttered shelves with its bottles brimming with mucky liquids, the rows of glass jars filled with powdered ginger root, the drawers lined with dried herbage of all manner, tied into neat batches with twine.
Brother Yu was more like an uncle to Ling, with his crinkled forehead and constantly raised eyebrows. He had been their neighborhood’s pharmacist for as long as she could remember. One thing all the neighbors could agree on was that his wife, Madam Yu, was the real force behind the business. It was Madam Yu who ran the shop with steely efficiency and excellent posture, Madam Yu whose keen sense of business helped them reach customers beyond their immediate neighborhood. Yet for all her business acumen, it was something else altogether that grew the Yu’s loyal following. Madam Yu was known to slip bits of rock sugar candies to children who had been dragged, terrified, into the shop, or to soften the loan repayment schedule for farmers who made long trips from rural areas, and who faced an especially challenging harvest season.
Madam Yu took immediate notice of Ling’s polite yet forthcoming manner, and would call loudly to her son as he marked inventory in the back room. “You see, Bo? You must look people in the eye and not look away when you speak to them, like Ling!”
But when Madam Yu was preoccupied with a customer or negotiations with one of their suppliers, Bo would come around from the back and sneak Ling a small pouch of dried ginger for the tea she liked. Ling watched how he managed delivery schedules and wrangled suppliers, maintained their ledgers, tracked the inventory of their most delicate and valuable goods. She could see that Bo handled the business of running the shop as well as his mother did, even if he did not match her in boisterousness.
Ling began saving the sweet and salty treats gifted to her by the Yu’s, carefully sealing them in a wooden box wrapped in her own clothes and tucked in the drawer. At first, she was unsure of her reasons for holding back—after all, why not share them with Lan right away? Yet something held her back, told her that there might be days that would demand far more from her than she could imagine. Ling had pushed these thoughts out of her mind with a shiver.
Then came the day Lan, just turned five years old, spilled a cup of hot tea all over their father’s bedside table, soaking his new pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes were a perk from his position in the military that he prized and often flaunted around the courtyard, tapping one out and letting it dangle from his lips as he strolled the perimeter. Their family was subject to the same rations as the rest of the families, but sometimes received an extra portion of meat or cigarettes for the month. Most of the time their father chose cigarettes.
Many years later, Ling still felt the bitter tinge of regret. Why did she not think quickly enough? Why didn’t she say that it was she, not Lan, who was responsible for carelessly setting the cup of tea on her father’s table? Even if their father knew Ling was lying, it’s possible that he would have taken it out on her anyway. It’s possible he would have exhausted himself, spent down his wrath on Ling, perhaps sparing Lan.
But that was not what happened.
That night their mother stayed up shushing and murmuring to Lan while she slathered sticky balm over the raw welts that covered the entirety of her younger daughter’s back. That night Ling remembered her stash and upended the contents of the wooden box—sour-sweet haw berry flakes, dried orange peels, candied plums, ginger jellies crinkling in waxy paper wrappers, heaping the treasure before Lan as she lay crumpled on the cot.
***
The apothecary sat squarely in the intersection between the residential quarters—rows of ash-gray buildings with bare courtyards just like her own building—and the business district. The bell attached to the shop’s front door rang almost nonstop in the mornings and early evenings as bicycles and wagons drifted down the main road.
Ling strode in, bringing a burst of cold air with her.
“Good day Madam Yu, I will need something different today.”
Madam Yu, surrounded by half-opened jars and neat piles of dried herbs, peered over her eyeglasses.
“Yes, child?”
Ling’s eyes flickered upwards. The shelves above Madam Yu’s raised brows were loaded with large hard-covered books, thicker than anything Ling had seen in her classroom or at Old Liu’s book stall in the alley market.
“The old acupuncture manual. I’d like to borrow it.”
Acupuncture’s uses were wide, treatment included everything from fever to back aches to relief from a woman’s monthly troubles. Ling knew her father consulted an acupuncturist for his chronic back pain. While she hadn’t yet heard of anyone using it to cure bed-wetting, since children usually outgrow it by the time they reach her age, this was a good place to start.
Madam Yu regarded the girl standing before her, her voice as clear as the bell that rang all day from their front door. In that moment she saw not only the quietly assertive twelve-year old standing before her, she also saw eight-year old Ling, skinny as a bean sprout, tough as a hardened gourd. That first day Madam Yu noticed the shadow on Ling’s cheek, the scab on her lower lip. “I ride too fast,” the young girl had said, her words slipping out quickly when used in a lie.
Over decades in business and in life, Madam Yu prided herself on her eye for finding potential. She could suss out which rowdy child would grow up to be the respectable businessman, who needed a simple nudge towards a better posture and future, and who would fall to drink and stupor. Who knows what Ling wanted with the acupuncture manual, but who needed to know. The girl was no fool.
Madam Yu wrapped the manual in brown paper, sending Ling off with the thick package underarm and a small bag of dried plums.
Ling had ridden nearly five blocks when Bo caught up to her, his exposed hands reddening in the bright morning chill. He hadn’t put on any gloves.
“You will need these,” he gasped, catching his breath as he placed a parcel into the bicycle’s basket. The parcel was long and thin, wrapped in brown paper, and jutted out awkwardly from the basket. Ling knew what it contained right away. Up to that point, her plan was simply to study the teachings first and worry later about finding needles.
At home, when she unwrapped it to find six needles bundled together, not quite new but carefully cleaned and laid in soft cloth, each as long as her forearm, she smiled.
***
Summer came and passed in a haze. With school out, Ling accompanied her mother to find sewing work, the long days bookended with chores and calling for Lan as she played in the courtyard with other children from the building complex. The manual and the needles sat in her drawers for months, never far from her mind.
Rations were good ahead of the October mid-autumn festival. Each family unit was granted an extra helping of sugar, flour, and lotus seeds, and so the Dai family went to work making lotus paste. It would be watered down but still fragrant and delicious.
Ling showed her sister how to split the lotus seeds open to remove the delicate pale green bits at the hearts, warning her that they were far more bitter than the worst medicine. For hours, Lan settled into her most determined squat, diligently removing the tender green germs while Ling boiled the degermed lotus seeds in batches, piling them in a large bowl for their mother to mash into paste.
Although the warmth of the summer season stretched and lingered, Ling could feel winter’s breath around the corner, ready to sink its teeth into her flesh and wake her up in the middle of the night in her own wretched urine. Ling shook her head as she drained the last batch of boiled lotus seeds.
No. This time she would be prepared.
After cleaning up the family’s dinner, Ling tucked herself into a quiet corner in the courtyard, away from the chattering elders and riotous children. She cracked the manual open, ran her fingertips over the dense text and diagrams. Page after page with illustrations of the human body, distilled to its most fundamental forms—simple lines and shapes. No organs or blood, just geometry. Ling followed the meridian lines that ran through the outlined bodies, tracing the top of the head all the way to the little toe.
When she felt ready enough, she returned inside to gather the needles, passing them slowly through the flame on their stove to sanitize them. Ling had grown up watching her mother sanitize sewing needles this way before using their sharp tips to coax splinters from skin. She tried it one time, when she was home by herself and a splinter from the weather-worn seesaw embedded itself into her palm. She had made a bloody mess of it, but triumphed in removing the unwelcome shard of wood. After several months, she could excise a splinter of any size cleanly, without a drop of unnecessary blood.
Now Ling reminded herself that she had handled needles before, used them as a tool for healing. This wouldn’t be all that different. She washed her feet and ankles with care, glancing at the book as if to reassure herself the pages were still there, the illustrations unchanged.
The window of their apartment was small and high but let in a stream of light and the sound of children’s laughter, Lan’s shouts melding with the voices of her playmates. There would not be many more evenings warm enough to play outside. Ling thought of the bite of winter air on skin, felt a shiver ripple through her body. A deep breath, then.
She held the sharp edge of the needle against her skin in the soft hollow by the tendons of her left ankle and, holding her breath, firmly tapped it into her skin.
There was the smallest sensation of a pinch, then nothing. Ling stared in wonder at the metal needle jutting out of her skin, not a drop of blood in sight. Did she just perform magic? She consulted the illustrations, added two more needles—tap, tap—and now, a trio of needles clustered around the softest part around her ankle, just behind the bony protrusion. The air stilled, or perhaps it was her breath. A moment or two or ten passed. And she started to feel it.
A soft buzzing sensation, the tiniest bird humming in her depths, a trilling that traveled gently from the soles of her feet up her legs, warming its way up her spine, slowing and lingering somewhere inside her chest, resting there.
Ling treated herself with acupuncture every other night from the mid-autumn festival through the delicate first snow in January, into February’s heavy pounding of frost and flurries. When the new year preparations rolled around late in the month, Ling was startled to realize she had not wet the bed once the entire winter.
