A yi Zhao stared down at her rice bowl, too tired after thirty-six hours without sleep to lift her hands and manipulate her chopsticks. She closed her eyes and sighed.
“My son is nothing but a criminal,” she said, then looked up at Faith. “Do you have children?”
Faith shook her head.
“It’s better that way.”
Faith reached out and held Ayi Zhao’s hand. “But then you wouldn’t have such a wonderful grandson.”
“I know, and it’s a shame that he’s been so humiliated by his parents. I hope he’s finding comfort in his faith.” She shrugged. “I don’t understand it. Christianity seems so odd. I try to imagine heaven and hell, but I can’t see them except as distorted reflections of what is around me. And I can’t imagine Jesus as a god, only as a foreigner’s benevolent ancestor.”
Ayi Zhao paused for a moment and her eyes went vacant, then she shook her head as if to say that she’d somehow gone off course.
Faith released Ayi Zhao’s hand and pointed at her bowl. “You need to eat.”
Ayi Zhao reached for her chopsticks and managed them well enough to capture a sliver of green bean lying on top of her rice. Instead of eating it, she said, “It bothered me that Wo-li traveled so much and that he’d never tell me where he was going or where he went. It bothers me even more now that I know what he was doing.”
Knocking on the open storeroom door drew their attention to Old Cat, who walked in.
“We need to know whether Wo-li will do it,” Old Cat said, looking back and forth between them. He spread his arms. “People’s courts have now sprung up in Chongqing and across the border into Qinghai and into the Muslim areas of Xinjiang.”
Old Cat reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone, and then held it in his hand by the edges, as though it represented an unfamiliar form of magic.
Faith guessed from his manner that he’d never handled one before this day.
“They’re looking at us for guidance,” Old Cat said.
Ayi Zhao and Faith understood exactly what he meant by guidance: If Chengdu could find a nonviolent form of justice, the others might follow.
“Your grandson was persuasive,” Old Cat said, “and for that reason I was willing to let a judicial process take place, but we’ve reached a stalemate with Wo-li, and the army can attack at any moment—it’s time to act.”
Faith was certain that Old Cat didn’t expect Ayi Zhao to plead for the life of her son and daughter-in-law, and she didn’t.
“If you spare their lives,” Ayi Zhao said, “Wo-li will tell you everything.”
Old Cat cocked his head toward the door and pointed at his ear. Only then did they notice the background murmur of voices in the hallway and the chanting from outside of the building.
As the chanting rose into cheering, Old Cat said, “We’ve liberated a forced labor camp north of the city—”
Ayi Zhao pulled back, as if jolted by Old Cat’s words.
“Does that mean that you freed Xing Ming and Wang Bai?”
Faith recognized the names: Xing and Wang were eighty-year-old women whose sentencing to hard labor for planning a protest at the Beijing Olympics had engendered worldwide condemnation.
Old Cat nodded. “The criminals imprisoned there have fled into the hills, but the political dissidents have joined us here. And having suffered the way they did, they have their own ideas of what should happen to Wo-li and his wife. Especially his wife.” Old Cat looked at Faith. “The party runs the slave labor system and she’s the highest party representative in Chengdu.” Old Cat shrugged. “So you see, their lives are not entirely in my hands.”
“Of course they are,” Ayi Zhao said. “You can let them escape after they cooperate.”
Old Cat squinted toward the ceiling, then looked back at her and shook his head.
“They’re too well-known and they don’t have false papers. Even if they could get to a foreign border, there’s no way they could cross.”
Faith raised her hand as a prelude to speaking, but then lowered it. The only immunity she possessed arose out of her position as “the anthropologist,” the nameless professional witness. She looked at Ayi Zhao and understood a mother’s duty, and then asked herself where her own duty lay—and she was neither a mother, nor a revolutionary, nor even Chinese.
But then an image came to her mind of a wire service photographer that she’d once seen in a newspaper. His laying down his camera and diving into a Rwandan river to rescue a Tutsi baby who’d been thrown in to drown by a Hutu militia man—except that Wo-li and his wife weren’t innocent children. They were despicable adults, but they had a mother who didn’t deserve to suffer.
“I can get them out,” Faith said.