Lost Underground, Chapter 6

Genghis Sung 

A letter arrived today from my long ago and forgotten past, addressed to me, Genghis Sung. The return address was from Seattle, Washington USA, but was not one I recognized. But to my greatest surprise, I recognized the sender and the Chinese characters written on the envelope. She was in Beijing when I last saw her over 30 years ago. Never would I ever expect that she would be on this continent in this lifetime. In my LA office, my excited fingers clumsily tore open the envelope to discover what mysterious message it might contain.  The familiar Chinese characters bounced off the page, but since I had not used the language for some time it took me a moment to decipher. 

Her words spilled out on the page like echoes from my native land. Old memories locked away from long ago flooded my mind like ink washes on yellowed paper. It was amazing and I felt my soul emerging from a black hole.  

She was staying with a friend in Seattle. I was pleased that she remembered me. I had left my past behind in China and that included my friends. Delighted to receive an invitation to meet her after all these years, I flew from LAX to SeaTac to see her. At the airport our cell phones met before our eyes had a chance to. She said she was wearing a pink jacket, and I found her waving her cell phone at me. We ran to one another in slow motion and hugged as though to squeeze ourselves through a time-warp. The ride to Seattle was filled with a chattering mixture of Mandarin and English with both of us speaking at the same time. I heard her question several times during that ride, “Genghis, Why did you leave us”? “Why did you leave us?” 

Her question surprised me and shook me from a long sleep. I remembered the lover I left behind in another time and distant place. That lover was the bookstore.  She provided me with shelter to heal my shattered body and gave me hope again for my lost dreams. The children of the Cultural Revolution were attracted to her like bees to blossoms. We were the Revolution’s Lost Generation…a generation of families torn apart in political turmoil…a generation denied education, tradition, and culture…a generation with nothing to do…a generation shackled to one someone else’s dream. Within her doors we sipped the nectar for dreaming our own dreams and finding freedom in books of western art and culture. The books were the beloved of our Lost Generation. They were the home and the shelter for the underground salons where we explored the forbidden activities of western art, poetry, and music in secret. Behind those doors we lost ourselves. 

Born in 1953 during the early part of the Cultural Revolution I was the son of the wealthy Sung family in China. It’s my birthday and I am 14 years old today. I’m on the precipice of where I’m to become a man, but too soon and unprepared. I was raised in innocence and protected as the prized son. I am not held responsible for anything or anyone. I am catered to as royalty by everyone especially by my sisters and my mother the way it’s expected to be according to Confucian philosophy.  

I’m a lucky kid and life is good. My father is a successful and famous Doctor trained in India, and my mother is an engineer. I have no worries. I go to the best schools in the country for the children of China’s leaders. After school I play happily with my sisters and younger brothers in our courtyard. We are the elite in our country and the world is ours for the taking. From our courtyard, I’ve counted the seasons of my life watching the Indian Lotus bloom in the shadows of the Magnolia, Rhododendrons, and Viburnum, and feel the safety of the predictability of home and hearth. 

Today life has taken an unexpected turn and I’m clueless about what to do.  

Instead of the birthday party I expected with people bearing gifts, crowds are invading the peacefulness of our courtyard shouting and banging on drums and metal dishpans and anything that makes loud noises. Led by a voice shouting slogans of patriotism over a bull horn, government people, neighbors, and strangers shatter the tranquility, tear apart my home and are taking everything of value and everything of no value. I can’t find my parents in the din, but in the frenzy, they were taken by the mob to be criticized in the street and to confess crimes they didn’t commit. My father was put in prison and my mother was exiled to her hometown where she paid penance for crimes, she too didn’t commit but was forced to confess. My siblings were also taken away but where? I didn’t know.

By nightfall, our home has been stripped of everything. As the terror draws to a close, I find myself alone in the shell of what was my home. Even the flowers in the garden bow their heads as a warning of more to come. The day turns to dusk, and that day turns to weeks, and I am abandoned. Being only 14 years old, I am supposed to live with my grandparents like so many kids. But I had no grandparents, and nobody checked. I seem to be lost in the shuffle among the masses of people being moved around the country. I was dirty, crying, and hungry.  Most families have been torn apart by the authorities. My parents are imprisoned in two different places, and my siblings have been sent far away from me and each other. I am the child of criminals, and I’m left to roam the streets of Beijing alone until I find a boy my own age in the same situation. In the days that follow, other boys join us one by one, each with a similar story, and each abandoned. Alone in Beijing we fend for ourselves. Together we rifle through empty and abandoned houses looking for anything we can find; government rations and food coupons, clothing, matches, and other paraphernalia we need to survive. We have nothing to do, nowhere to be and no supervision. We became a family of lost boys, learning from one another, and an occasional older boy, about the things we shouldn’t have to know.  

It seems like an eternity, but a year passes and I’m having another birthday, and I’m 15. In 12 chaotic months I have gained a new kind of education and a newfound courage that surprises me.  

With each passing day, I watch people I know gradually transforming into strangers. Some hide in shadows like beaten animals, some become vocal and belligerent. I didn’t realize at the time what was happening, but what took some time to develop, now feels like an instant. The sky tumbles down around me and all of China.  

I don’t recognize my former self. No longer innocent and protected, I have become a street smartened bully beating up other kids to get what I want, when I want it, and even steal to get it for me. I discovered black market means to get alcohol, cigarettes, and a few drugs for myself. I sold what I didn’t need to my friends. I soon tired of their bragging about their girlfriends, what they stole, and who they beat up. I set out on my own.  

I miss my family and our home. I learn where my siblings are, each far from one another in different parts of the country, like other “sent down” youths. There is no means of communication except by word of mouth or letter which mostly never arrives or is censored beyond comprehension. I question friends and neighbors about my parents.  

I go to the Wall of Democracy every day to see if anything is posted about my family.  The daily news posts revealed bit by bit, a day at a time, that during the daily prison struggle meetings my father is publicly humiliated, beaten, forced to kneel on broken glass, and admit to crimes he did not commit. Another post said his fingernails were extracted slowly one at a time. Reading today’s news, another kid breathing down my neck and reading over my shoulder said matter of factly that my father was pushed beyond human endurance and has taken his own life. Oh! He said, He is dead.  

Deep inside my chest an atom bomb explodes. I drop to my knees, and I begin to convulse. My skin crawls, my body tenses, I shiver violently, and my teeth chatter. My saliva turns sour, and my stomach aches so hard, I’m drenched in a cold sweat. An uncontrolled rage invades my whole being and I am utterly and completely helpless. I hear myself scream and scream, but my ears fall deaf leaving only a loud ringing. I feel someone’s arms around me, holding me, attempting to contain my anger and my grief. Darkness falls, it’s night now and those arms still hold on tight. It’s one of the older boys from the group I abandoned. He rocks me until, out of exhaustion, I fall unconsciously into sleep. I’m just a kid, everything has been taken away from me, I’ve nothing to lose, and now I’m totally alone. I feel my soul steal silently from my being. 

Throughout the country everything is shut down by the government: schools, libraries, factories…everything. The country is in total chaos and I’ve nowhere to be. 

With no adult supervision since losing my family and my home, I live by my wits in the city. I rail loudly against Chairman Mao with no fear of the consequences. I have nothing more to lose. I feel no pain, fear, sadness, and forget what happiness was. I feel nothing.  

I continue to hang out with other kids with no home and no family and no choices. With nothing to do, we play all day and all night, riding the bicycles we own or steal. I just steal to have something to do even when I don’t want the goods. Yesterday I stole a box of carrots from a street merchant. I ran around the corner and tossed them in a trash bin. A bunch fell from my hand to the ground. I picked up a rock and for no reason I started pounding and pounding the roots until they were mush. With absolutely nothing to do or think about, I called the other boys over to smear the orange mess on everything within reach. I start laughing like a madman until we are all laughing maniacally. More and more, I am energized by the maniacal. Like the deranged, I laugh as if insane and eventually drive away my friends. I find power in mania. People fear me which suits me because I trust no one. I can laugh like a lunatic and watch people slink against the walls then run to get away from me. 

I make daily pilgrimages to the Democracy Wall in the middle of Beijing to see what, if anything, new has been posted. I look for news of my family but never find anything. For all I know, they are all dead. At the wall today I feel once again that enormous surge of mixed emotions; frustration, rage, fear, sadness, and abandonment all at once. I can’t control myself and I scream with all my strength from that place where my soul used to dwell, “Down with Chairman Mao!” I turn on my heels and run and run until I see that the policemen who often guard the wall are not following. Breathless, I slow my pace and see homes in my old neighborhood that had been ransacked. The contents are strewn across the courtyards as if those too were running away with nowhere to go. Looking for warmth in the early winter evening, I follow billows of smoke to find a fire where people burn objects that might land them in prison. Objects considered evil from the west…objects too large to bury. I warm my hands at a bonfire where a man feeds his family’s altar one large piece at a time into the fire. I’ve only heard about the burnings of precious and priceless objects before, but now with my own eyes, I watch the man weep as it burns. As the dawn breaks and the embers slowly turn to ash, I see the man’s tear-stained face. He digs a shallow pit and buries a jade Buddha in hopes to retrieve it someday. He weeps again. I can feel no sympathy. To me these are just pieces of the past destined for destruction or buried for safe keeping. I used to love these things that feed the soul. It seems my soul is no longer hungry. 

Dawn, and I spot the policemen from the Democracy Wall. I try to not make eye contact, but in doing so, they’ve spotted me. I sprint down a broken sidewalk, feel a stone in my shoe cutting my toe, and I duck into an alley. I’m trapped in a dead end. I’m apprehended by three large policemen who force me to an abandoned building.  They slam my body onto the ground and push my face into the gravel. I start choking on the dust. My head is shoved under a wooden chair, and I feel the agony of the bones in my back breaking one by one as their bats beat me with targeted blows. The last thing I remember is watching the heels of their shoes move quietly away. Helpless and alone again, all fades to black.  

Finally awake, I am alone and in a hospital. They tell me I’ve been here for some time.  

It’s summer again and stiflingly hot in Beijing. An overhead fan stirs slowly and quietly doing nothing more than to disturb the cobwebs in the ceiling. I am one of three patients in a room with 4 metal beds on the second floor of the Beijing Hospital. In the bed to my right is a military leader who fought to capture a military compound. A knock on his door led to a knife plunged into his belly time and again making ten slashes cutting into his kidneys and intestines. He talks incessantly about the revenge he will take when he is released. In the bed to my left, a famous Doctor of 70 lies in delirium. He suffers from a ruptured hernia resulting from extreme anger when his home was raided by the young revolutionaries. The noise from his delirium drowns out the other patient’s ramblings. 

I’m caught in the middle bed. A 15-year-old counter revolutionary expelled from the Red Guard because of my family’s reputation. I had been beaten fiercely by the police for an infraction I couldn’t even remember. They broke my backbones one by one with their batons and I felt something rupturing deep inside me. The pain I feel is pure anger.  

The Red Guards, the political team from the school where I was imprisoned, stand guard like sentinels at my hospital bed to ensure that upon my discharge, they would be ready to escort me back into custody. I learned that the chief surgeon of the hospital who was overseeing our care was subjected to continuous criticism and self-criticism sessions like my father and so many others experienced. Pushed beyond unimaginable suffering, the doctor committed suicide. As for me, I planned an escape. I overheard the two Red Guards talk about stealing drugs from the hospital. I saved the narcotics given to me for my pain and sold all but one to my captors for a pack of cigarettes. We toast Mao and pop the pills. They got so high they forgot about me. I steal away quietly, slinking into the shadows of the alley.  

I’m not sure how much time has passed since that last hospitalization, but I notice that my sleeves and pant legs don’t reach to where they used to. I continue to live by my wits with no family and no real friends. I keep my back to the wall, and trust no-one but myself. Hunger is my constant companion in spite of the food coupons issued to everyone by the government. Shelter is not always an option. I sleep in empty buildings where fire has destroyed everything, or in the parks around the city, or in animal stalls using the animals to keep me warm on colder nights. Once in a while, I stay with friends, but never for very long. Encountering random gangs of kids looting places and selling contraband, I join the fracas, abscond with arms full of goods and eventually sell those objects for cash. I find this quite lucrative. Graduating from petty theft to higher crimes over time, I join a network of international traffickers to support myself. Through them I buy and sell guns, drugs, and women in darkened alleys, empty buildings, and toilets. I feel nothing. I care about nobody. I know no fear. I have nothing left to lose and nobody to care for or about. Nobody cares for me, or knows I exist. I lost the ability to cry long ago. 

Like the rhythms of the seasons, I get caught, beaten by the police, bandaged in a hospital, and sent to jail. When I’m released the cycle begins again as sure as day becomes night. The rage within me keeps me alive but it always ends the same. I am always the aggressor and leader of any group. I talked a friend into stealing some heroin from a hospital. We smoked it and got so sick we had to return to that same hospital for help. We lied and told them we had food poisoning.  We won’t do that again, but whenever or wherever we could buy or steal drugs off the streets, we would sell to others. 

By the time I was 17 I met a painter who calls himself Fan. His father was the official portrait painter of Chairman Mao and his family lives in the center of Beijing in a huge house with many rooms. I began painting with Fan. I find painting quite cathartic. At first my paintings mimicked the impressionists since China’s relationship with Russia allowed us a peek into European painting. Dabbing these little dots of color soon bores me. Switching to bold strokes of thick color, I lose myself in the process venting my anger and frustrations through the paint.  

I begin painting with thick slabs of paint, ragged knives, and bristly brushes long since discarded by other artists. My feelings of rage, desperation, and longing, are unleashed, breaking through the layers of dissonant color. Lacerating and bursting through the surface with my broken tools I slash at ancient ghosts that bleed in red and yellows. My emotions crescendo and quickly decrescendo. My soul attempts an escape where the rhythm of anger takes a quick breath, but with a violent violet-black smear, I smash it back, imprison, and finally seal it with the last charge of energy I have in me. Salty beads of sweat pour from my forehead, into my eyes, saturating my shirt, and I fall into exhaustion. A pulsing in my ears, shuts out all sound. I paint like a madman turning out a profusion of paintings in a short time. Fearing that the police might come and confiscate them, and worse yet, imprison us along with Fan’s entire family, we hide the paintings in the staircases, in the walls, and even within the rooftop.  

Fan finds my paintings so exciting and unusual, that he offers to feed and house me there for free so I can spend my time painting and not worry about anything else. Most artists would never pass up this chance. But my restless nature and need to remain free overshadows all other human needs and I refuse the offer, but continue to paint there at random times, but mostly alone. 

One by one seven young boys attend an underground salon and over time become great friends and companions. As we begin to mature, all 7 feel an urge to be close to Mei Ling, but she refuses an exclusive relationship with any of us. Putting us off, she treats us like children playing a game of blind man's bluff or maybe tag teasing us with her sexuality to entice our imaginations until she gives herself to each lover one by one. Being the youngest in our group of pubescent boys, I keep my desire for her to myself while she appears to enjoy my company. Oddly, she is the one that holds our friendships together.  

As a guest of Fan, I find myself at a party in their home where young artists, poets, and philosophers gather in secret meetings. Li Mei Ling and her brother Mu Chen host these underground salons in their home where they paint, write poetry, conduct readings and exhibitions under the radar of the government. She is having a birthday party and many like-minded young people with similar interests are in attendance. 

Li Mei Ling is a most remarkable girl. She lives with her brother in a concrete walk-up where they hold the underground salons for young intellectuals. Their home is not a romantic setting, but what takes place within the walls is where the romance of language and imagery gives birth.  

Li Mei Ling writes poetry and paints while her brother paints and writes some poetry. Their many friends and acquaintances live with them randomly coming and going in a continuous stream of youth. 

During this period Mao’s wife Jiang Qing ran the country’s cultural affairs and was known as the Paramount Leader as Mao’s emissary. She organized the notorious Gang of Four that everyone feared. To oppose her means torture and certain death at the hands of her Red Guard. Under the shadow of Jiang Qing, we take refuge in the underground salon in Mei Ling’s home where I stay sporadically in Mu Chen’s bedroom. He is my safe place. He is a stable and quiet boy who knows where to find my soul and how to coax it to him. We go out with other kids and paint and write poetry. But he and I often go off by ourselves and critique one another’s painting style. He appreciates me as the youngest in the group and as an avant-garde painter, poet, and philosopher often leading intellectual discussions in the salon. But like a big brother I count on Mu Chen for shelter. 

I am an empty vessel that fills suddenly with rage and then explodes as if shot by a bullet leaving shards of trouble in my wake for those close to me. Since my father took his own life, I feel absolute loneliness and abandonment. With nothing more to lose I take dangerous chances to create excitement within me where I usually feel totally numb. Fearing that my friends might be punished, if only through association, I try to steal away when they are sleeping leaving no note or trace for them to find me. From time to time, I return to them, but usually to recover from a beating, torture, or escape. I return bandaged and vehemently refuse to explain where I had been or why I was injured so badly. After a while everyone stops asking. 

Today is August 27, 1972, and the big day that we’ve been anticipating. Today we will hang our art exhibition in Fan’s home. We expect a large crowd. 

At the first light of day, I leap from my sofa bed at Mu Chen’s to greet a demanding day ahead. I dive under Mu Chen’s bed to retrieve the paintings he hid under there to keep safe from prying eyes. He told me to look under the third tread of the staircase leading up to his home. As I pry up the board, the nails break the silence with loud squawking as they give way to the claw hammer. I find paintings that have been hiding silently like small kids playing hide and seek.  I pull the smaller paintings from their secret place and find, typical of Mu Chen, they are carefully wrapped in brown waxed paper and tied with twine terminating in a bow. Everything he does is to perfection and in rhythm with the beat of his heart. I sweep off the dirt particles that have sifted through the boards and blow off the remaining dust. 

Arms loaded with rolls of paintings, we head to Fan’s house to mount an exhibition of forbidden art. Fan is waiting for us when we arrive and has already hung the work of a few other painters. He says this will be the very first underground painting show in Beijing and that we will be remembered for it.  

As we begin the installation, Mu Chen hangs my largest paintings first. These are the paintings that reveal my innermost feelings, the feelings that rage from deep inside me. Seeing them on the wall all together for the very first time, lined up one by one, and side by side, I feel my soul emerging, draining, then splattering once again in syncopation with the ebb and flow of the blood racing through my veins. My head pounds and the rage inside me soars. I try so hard to suppress it that it leaves me exhausted and beads of sweat cover my brow. Mu Chen calms me down, as only he can. I feel my strength slowly return and I’m ready to finish the work of hanging the paintings before our visitors arrive. 

There are hundreds of paintings to hang in two of the home’s largest rooms. Mu Chen contributed 6 very large paintings done in his methodic classical style, and he hangs nearly 400 of mine of varying sizes. Finally finished we reward ourselves with a cheap bottle of wine and some smokes while the first visitors begin to emerge. Word of mouth has brought many people here for the exhibition. Ecstatic at the turnout, our fear remains that we may be discovered by the police and dragged off to prison. Mu Chen will burn my paintings first if he thinks they are coming. He knows that I paint what I feel: the raw rage at the government that took everything. 

After the exhibition, I overhear the policemen talking to Fan’s mother outside his house where the exhibition still hangs. But I can’t understand their conversation. Fan’s father is a high-ranking army officer who is in prison which means even more danger and harsher punishment should we be caught with this contraband. I panic! My heart leaps into my throat at the thought of the danger to Mu Chen, Mei Ling, and their friends. I turn on my heels and run as fast as I can from Beijing to Lake Baiyangdian, which I learned is home to some famous poets and those from the earlier Sun Brigade salon.  

It is my first trip to that lake where I hope to join some new poets and artists. Distracted from the events in Beijing, I’m tired and parched from running, I look for a guy who calls himself Monkey whom I also know as Mang Ker. I found him in a bar slumped over some papers that I later discovered were his poems. After several beers, Monkey and I become best friends. The most famous poets of the day Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Genzi, and Monkey are staying in Baiyangdian, and I meet them all. Baiyangdian pulls me in like a magnet. 

At the lake, we have nothing to do so we talk about how to write. Monkey had just started to write poetry in the Russian style. Finishing the last pages of a book I brought with me about the French poet, Baudelaire, I toss the book to Monkey and start to paint. After studying its pages, Monkey begins writing in what is now considered the modern style. Since that time, Mang Ker has become an internationally renowned poet. 

Among that same group of poets is Genzi. He is a very tall, quiet guy, very kind, always deep in thought, and is known as being too lazy. He has an impressive voice and is a baritone. He’s the only one in the group who can get a job because he sings for the military. He doesn’t have enough ambition to write down his poems to keep them. In fact, many of his poems are lost because of this laziness. I predict that while his poems are powerful and expressive, those poems won’t be preserved the way Mu Chen has tried to preserve our paintings. I admire his poems, and he admires my painting. The other guys refer to us as the two geniuses. Listening to Genzi read his poems I am taken aback and shocked by Genzi’s poem where he uses the imagery of “the sky was like a tongue”. This is the most vivid and graphic modern image I’ve ever heard.  It inspires me to write a poem. I realize that a new poetry movement is starting right here and right at this moment. Yet I’m terrified because this new poetry is completely anti-revolutionary, what that might mean for Mu Chen and the salon in Beijing if discovered. I must leave again. I pocket my heart and flee.  

I make my way back to the Beijing salon. I need grounding again and this time Mu Chen is the magnet. A mule is often put in a corral to calm a wild horse. Mu Chen is that mule for the wild horse in me. 

It’s another hot summer day. I go with Mei Ling to sketch. As we pass Tiananmen Square, we watch the rising ceremony of the national flag. She leans into me and whispers, “When can we see a Swiss flag flying on Tiananmen Square?” She says that their flag with the red cross is a symbol of freedom.  

We approach a long staircase, and she runs to the top. I see her taking chalk from her bag then she draws ducks from the top of the staircase all the way to the bottom. Sitting at the bottom she crosses her legs, she looks up at me and asks in a childish way, “When will we be able to swim as freely as these ducks?” I tell her we dream of the outside world and freedom, and then we paint it. That’s all we can do for now. 

Times like these, spent with Mei Ling makes me long for more intimacy with her and a piece of my soul begins to emerge. Embarrassed, I swallow hard and that feeling disappears like a popped bubble. I cannot allow myself the luxury of feeling. 

It's 1976.The word everywhere is that Mao is dead. The Cultural Revolution is over, and Jiang Qin and her gang of 4 have been jailed for their crimes. I’m now 23 years old and there’s speculation that Deng Xiao Ping is destined to become the new Premier in a year or two. I hear that Deng will open up China realizing that our Lost Generation, having no education, is in dire trouble. His five-year plan will include educating us and will send students all over the world to study and return to China with new knowledge to help the country.  

I prepare my own plan for escape from my past and this godforsaken country. My art has brought nothing but trouble for me and I need to free myself from this criminal life. I am determined to leave the arts by turning to science. I remember sitting on my father’s lap and learning a few basics of physics. He put a tea leaf from its canister into his bowl of tea and gave the leaf a shove. We watched the leaf drift forward then it drifted back to where it started. He told me that the pushing action would reverse itself and the leaf would come back as if there was someone pushing it back in reaction. My father encouraged me to study engineering. Something I never forgot.  

Tsinghua University in Beijing is the most prestigious engineering school in the country and where I must enroll. But first I must pass the entrance exams. However, during the Cultural Revolution all textbooks were burned as evil western thought, and anything left in the libraries were stolen.  

As a part of the country’s next 5-year plan, ancient texts were retrieved from various tombs throughout China along with other precious and important items belonging to the dead. During the heat of the revolution Mao's followers destroyed anything classical and everything old, while scholars hoarded and protected whatever ancient books they had. However, unbeknownst to Mao’s troops, each time advancing armies or warlords came close, the texts were moved and carried by hand to a safe place until the fighting had passed.  Other texts and literature were carried away with the Nationalist Kuomintang party when they fled to Taiwan when Mao took power. So, I along with other scholars, tracked down these ancient texts in temples and private collections containing the scientific information we needed. I am amazed at how old the volumes are. The brittle pages crackle as I turn them and I’m aware of how carefully I must handle them.  

I taught myself enough to pass the arduous entrance exams and enter Tsinghua University. At the University I learn from prestigious American Professors who are brought to China to teach us. The professors are so generous and so smart with good ideas. However, the projects they assign are so poor because the schools were more interested in pumping out a quota of graduates for propaganda than challenging or teaching their students. So, there is nothing new and no challenge for me.  

After graduation ceremonies, one of the school officials handed me an envelope that read: Congratulations! You have been selected to join the new program for overseas scholars; a 4-year program abroad with all expenses paid in the United States of America! At that, my hands got sweaty, my heart raced and quickly and quietly, I left the reception muttering to myself: Taking government money means an obligation to return to China. I will never touch the money, and I swear I will never return.  

I discovered that the tuition at a community college in Utah was the cheapest college tuition in America for studying physics. Finishing there I applied to and was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who offered me a full scholarship for graduate work in nuclear science. They obtained a green card for me so I could work legally, then helped me acquire American Citizenship required for working on sensitive research for the nuclear bomb. This project reminds me of the anger I felt when I learned my father committed suicide. But I swallow hard and shove any sense of guilt or rage as I learned to do so long ago. This was a big step for me for my future in science. 

I feel very lucky in America. I am provided with my very own lab with sophisticated state of the art equipment. My lab gleams with chrome and glass. I love how everything is void of color and everything is sterile. My scholarship along with grants pays for everything I need. I work in my lab nearly 24/7 with fury and madness. Energy charges through my body and when I’m tired, I sleep in the lab with my equipment. I isolate myself and deliberately avoid attempts and friendship. I am alone and I prefer it. Students in the lab next to mine have their own projects so happily, I make no attempt at a social life. I am in love with my lab and my equipment. Here I am safe. 

I graduate from M.I.T with a PhD in Nuclear Physics.  

I am now in my 30’s and living in California near San Francisco. In all these years in America I have not changed my preference for living a solitary life, making no close friends and barely any acquaintances. To satisfy my employer, I have attended counseling on and off for this quirk in my character but have never taken it seriously. Strangely, I like the rush of anxiety when avoiding close contact with other people. The pain I suffer from abandonment is a strange drug for me, thriving on its highs and lows. 

Attending a seminar today I met a physicist from Singapore who speaks Mandarin and having spent some time with her, the language has become familiar once again. Sitting down with her for the first time our conversation feels a bit too intimate because she sits so close to my face. My chest tightens, my scalp tingles, and I feel the need to excuse myself and run away. I use the breath control methods I learned in my counseling sessions. I feel my entire body flush with sticky perspiration. My body heat is trapped under my clothing, and I feel it clinging to my back. I try to divert my attention and focus on the tiny pin on her lapel that bears the flag of Singapore; a white crescent guarding 5 tiny white stars on a red ground with a white banner beneath. I begin to speak and hope she doesn’t notice the dampness on my forehead. I fear that she can see the pulse of my racing heart through my shirt. But the tremors in her hands show her nervousness too.  After a few drinks we both relax, and she reveals that she doesn’t have American citizenship and fears overstaying her visa. She thinks marrying would be beneficial for both of us since we speak the same language and both study physics. She would be eligible for naturalization. For me marrying the Singaporean woman was a logical thing to do, great tax benefits and housing for married couples, and we both could be left to pursue our separate lives. 

It’s been a month since we met and now in offices of the County of San Francisco, we are standing before the County Clerk who pronounces us husband and wife.  In this civil ceremony, the marriage is more of a transaction, and I’m reminded of the black-market transactions back in China. Only this is a legal venue with American flags, bright lights, and not a darkened abandoned building. The transaction is complete, and we each return to our respective workplaces.  

I have the ability to compartmentalize my life as I had done during my youth. While we live together in the same California apartment, we live parallel lives and without passion. I find it interesting that since coming to America I am no longer aggressive and temperamental, and over time and distance the rage seems to have subsided.  I have lost my edge and my return to painting reflects that. I am at last alone and able to focus 100% of my time on pure science. 

The Covid pandemic forces isolation in our homes and I have the luxury of painting full time again. I still paint what I feel but the anger fled to where my soul vanished long ago. Grabbing one of the last small remaining paintings from the old exhibition at Fan’s home, I place it on my easel to study my self-portrait again. An angry patch of color flies off the painting and lands on my finger fluttering like a butterfly. Carefully I put it back in place and cover the entire painting with a thin layer of translucent paint sealing it forever in a pale shadow. I place a new date on the work, 2023. 

No longer does the flash of rage appear in my work.  I now paint quickly in a single layer of thin paint. My colors are muted, and my compositions are modern and serene. Even the reds are no longer lively, and the colors are all softened as if all cut with gray. I paint in protest but even then, the emotion I felt as a young man has disappeared.  I draw rigid, parallel lines and boxes creating controlled environments even when suggesting political commentary. My soul sleeps below that thin veneer of paint, sealed safely away. 

The pandemic has subsided, and I return to my office for the first time since the lockdowns. An empty envelope remains on my desk where I had left it like a trophy. Picking it up, I run my fingers over the Chinese characters written in perfect calligraphy hoping to coax something to life. The contents have disappeared somewhere, replaced with a hollow, empty void. I want to revisit our moments together, but my heart won’t release even a whisper of our past. The only sound I hear is Mei Ling’s question echoing again and again, “Why did you leave us?”