Striking the Balance

“This is a bayonet,” Liu Han answered in Chinese. She repeated the key word: “Bayonet.”

Liu Mei made a noise that might have been intended forbayonet, though it also sounded like a noise a scaly devil might have made. The baby pointed in the general direction of the bayonet again, let out another interrogative cough, and said, “This?” once more.

Liu Han needed a moment to realize that, in spite of the cough, the question itself had been in Chinese. “This is a bayonet,” she said again. Then she hugged Liu Mei and gave her a big kiss on the forehead. Liu Mei hadn’t known what to make of kisses when Liu Han got her back, which struck Liu Han as desperately sad. Her daughter was getting the idea now: a kiss meant you’d done something pleasing.

The baby laughed in reply. Liu Mei laughed, but seldom smiled. No one had smiled at her when she was tiny; the scaly devils’ faces didn’t work that way. That saddened Liu Han, too. She wondered if she would ever be able to make it up to Liu Mei.

She paused and sniffed, then, despite the baby’s protests-Liu Mei, whatever else you could say about her, wasn’t shy about squawking-put a fresh cloth around her loins after cleaning the night soil from them.

“Something goes through you,” she told her daughter. “Is it enough? Are you getting enough to eat?”

The baby made squealing noises that might have meant anything or nothing. Liu Mei was old for a wet nurse now, and Liu Han’s breasts, of course, were empty of milk because her child had been stolen from her so young. But Liu Mei did not approve of the rice powder and overcooked noodles and soups and bits of pork and chicken Liu Han tried to feed her.

“Ttomalss must have been feeding you from tins,” Liu Han said darkly. Her mood only got angrier when Liu Mei looked alert and happy at hearing the familiar name of the little scaly devil.

Liu Han had eaten food from tins, too, when the little devils kept her prisoner aboard the airplane that never came down. Most of those tins had been stolen from Bobby Fiore’s America or other countries that ate similar kinds of foods. She had loathed them, almost without exception. They were preferable to starving to death, but not, as far as she was concerned, greatly preferable.

But they were what Liu Mei had known, just as the scaly devils were the company she had known. The baby thought the food of China, which seemed only right and proper to Liu Han, tasted and smelled peculiar, and ate it with the same reluctance Liu Han had felt in eating canned hash and other horrors.

Foreign-devil food could still be found in Peking, though most of it was under the control of rich followers of the Kuomintang’s counterrevolutionary clique or those who served as the scaly devils’ running dogs-not that those two groups were inseparable.

Nieh Ho-T’ing had offered to get some by hook or by crook so Liu Mei could have what she was used to.

Liu Han had declined when he first made the offer and every time since. She suspected-actually, she more than suspected; she was sure-one reason he’d made his proposal was to help keep the baby quiet through the night. She had a certain amount of sympathy with that, and certainly had nothing against a full night’s sleep, but she was dedicated to the idea of turning Liu Mei back into a proper Chinese child as fast as she could.

She’d had that thought many times since she got her baby back. Now, though, she stared down at Liu Mei in a new way, almost as if she’d never seen the child before. Her program was the opposite of the one Ttomalss had had in mind: he’d been as intent on making Liu Mei into a scaly devil as Liu Han was on turning her daughter back into an ordinary, proper person. But both the little devil and Liu Han herself were treating Liu Mei as if she were nothing more than a blank banner on which they could draw characters of their own choosing. Wasn’t a baby supposed to be something besides that?

Nieh wouldn’t have thought so. As far as Nieh was concerned, babies were small vessels to be filled with revolutionary spirit. Liu Han snorted. Nieh was probably annoyed that Liu Mei wasn’t yet planning bombings of her own and didn’t wear a little red star on the front of her overalls. Well, that was Nieh’s problem, not Liu Han’s or the baby’s.

Over a brazier in a corner of the room, Liu Han had a pot ofkao kan mien-erh, dry cake powder. Liu Mei liked that better than the other common variety of powdered rice,lao mi mien-erh or old rice flour. She didn’t like either one of them very much, though.

Liu Han went over and took the lid off the pot. She stuck in her forefinger and took it out smeared with a warm, sticky glob of the dry cake powder. When she brought the stuff over to Liu Mei, the baby opened her mouth and sucked the powdered rice off the finger.