When Rape Flowers Bloom (9)
Swannlee-126 01/21 10482
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When Rape Flowers Bloom
By Swann Lee
Chapter 9
When the apple blossoms are blooming, my parents finally let me out to go to school.
One afternoon, after the first class, a boy rushes into the classroom and yells excitedly, “The bullet-targets are here.” So the death-penalty criminals have arrived. Following Teacher Chen’s direction from the day before, I have brought a bamboo stool to school. Usually, after the annual Public Sentencing Meeting, the brave students would go to watch the executions in the fields. I never had the courage to go.
On the wooden platform by the west end of the campus the criminals are standing with their arms tied behind them, their heads hanging down to their chests.
“There has been a surge of criminal activities in southern provinces,” the presiding police officer reads a document in his hand. “We just received a special document last week. The government has decided to implement a harsh nationwide crackdown.”
At that moment a young man in a striped prisoners’ uniform holds up his shaved head for the first time. His eyes calmly search in the sea of little students. Over the bobbing black heads, his swollen eyes meet mine. He stares at me with no emotion on his face. He is very thin. A few scars are visible on his cheeks even from so far away. I hope he will look away but he won’t. I cast my eyes down to the ground. A minute later, I glance up and he is still looking at me.
Who is he? Why does he, a man who is dying soon, look at me like this?
The police officer goes on reading the document. There is a woman who stabbed her husband with a pair of scissors more than a hundred times and killed him. There is a young man of seventeen who raped sixty-five little girls in two years. There is a cadre who embezzled one thousand yuan. There is a young man of sixteen who robbed a passenger of seventeen yuan. And there is a young man of eighteen, who raped his own sister.
“Datong!” Chunyang turns to me in shock.
“What is rape?” students whisper and turn to me with wonder in their eyes.
I look at the young man in the distance. With a bald head and swollen eyes, he looks like a smaller and funnier version of Datong. Slowly, his body sinks lower until he plops down on his knees, his eyes fixed on me. There seems to be a lot of emotions in his gaze: blame, affection, despair, guilt, shame. Then there seems to be nothing at all. “Get up!” a policeman kicks and yells at him. I stand up, plant my feet among students sitting on little wooden or bamboo stools, and exit the crowd. Linlin and Chunyang follow me. Teacher Zhang comes to talk to me, but I push him away.
We walk out of the campus, down the slope, and then sit at the bank of the cooing river. Beyond us are the rolling spring plain, the vast golden rape flower fields, the gray Yulong town sitting on the horizon. In the distance, crowds of students flow over the riverside meadow following the policemen and the criminals bound like bamboo-leaf-wrapped rice dumplings for the Dragon Boat Festival. It looks like a dianying with no sound.
The last gunshot brings me back to reality. Only at this moment do I realize that I should have let Datong use me without ever protesting: my big brother, who has grown up with me and taken care of me, is not coming home again. His young body is lying in the green fields of our hometown, already beginning to nourish the land beneath. This is his last spring.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to express her thanks to Ha Jin, Leslie Epstein, and Allegra Goodman for their comments and suggestions.
ALSO BY SWANN LEE
FICTION
Heidi, Girl Fish, and Underground Communist
Who Are Our Friends? Who Are Our Enemies?
Mistress of the Teahouse
Rhapsody of Yulong River
Thief of Chalk Sticks
Baba Wants to Become a Communist
The Girl from Highwater
Love at Impossible Times
Two Virgins
The Ritual
Child in the Fog
PLAY
Waiting for Green Card
If you enjoyed this novella, you can get from Amazon the kindle version of the book by the same title, When Rape Flowers Bloom, a novel of connected stories, including: Heidi, Girl Fish and Underground Communist; Mistress of the Teahouse; Rhapsody of Yulong River; Thief of Chalk Sticks; Who Are Our Friends? Who Are Our Enemies?; Baba Wants to Become a Communist; and The Girl from Highwater.
The Amazon link is: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B003C1QYI6/ref=redir_mdp_mobile
About the author: Swann Lee grew up in China and moved to the U.S. more than a decade ago. Living in drastically different ideologies and cultures, she writes fiction set in China and the U.S. to make sense of the traumas, conflicts, and disillusions that the world has to offer. She has also been engaged in anti-Racism and anti-Sexism activism in recent years. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was a Leslie Epstein Fellow. Her stories have been published in (un)civil, Charles River Journal, 236, and Writers Talk.
