A Map of Paradise

Book by Sledge Linda Ching

"Fusan.  The Blessed Isles on the rim of the eastern sea," the ragged soldier announced to the woman who had ceased to believe in paradise.  "The greenest one will be our home."

A wind was stirring the clouds above the bay, and the air smelled of salt and monsoon.  Crickets in the reeds kept up a rapid report, warning of rain.  About them in caves burned the fires of other hunger-marchers like themselves, peasants driven by famine, drought, and war toward the southern-most ports of Kwangtung Province as the great peasant rebellion sputtered and died.

Pao An and Rulan had come on foot, hundreds of miles from Nanking, the ruined rebel capital, to this makeshift shelter in the barren hills above Hong Kong bay.  There was no place left in China to which an escaped concubine and a peasant general with a price on his head could run.  "Except the Blessed Isles," Pao An insisted.

"You're a fool to believe the lies that poets tell," Rulan said bitterly.  "I believed in dream kingdoms when we went to war.  Nothing will make me believe again."

"Fusan  is real," Pao An insisted.  "Men from Kwangtung knew those isles long before the bak kuei white devils claimed them.  We sailed along those shoals and mingled our blood with the dark people there.  Only when the empire closed itself to the world did we forget that lucky place." He began to draw a crude map in the dirt with his fingers.

Rulan watched the firelight blaze up in his eyes.  Surely this battle-scarred soldier did not believe Fusan, the lost paradise of legend, existed! Surely he was inventing a haven for a woman who had traveled rivers clogged with corpses, seen village after village laid waste by war...

"Some say that Fusan is California, the mountain where Tang men dig for gold," he went on in a rush.  He stabbed at the dirt, creating islands with pebbles and sand.  "But I believe the Blessed Isles lie closer, in the heart of the eastern ocean, the place sailors call 'Hawaii.' A man can rebuild there.  Trade his labor for cash."

"Not Hawaii!" Rulan declared, understanding immediately the price he intended to pay for paradise.  "Not where Tang men make themselves slaves cutting cane."

"You sell your labor, not your life! A few years' sweating in the cane fields--then you are free to reap the riches of those islands! No village headman to order you here and there.  No imperial official to put a cangue around your neck for not bending low enough.  A new earth for people without home or village or clan--"

"But we have old enemies there! What about the man and woman who still own me? What if the magistrates of that place force me back to them and put you in chains?"

They sat in silence awhile, each turned away from the other--until she moved closer, pulling him down so he might seek only the paradise that her body could bestow.  His lovemaking, always ardent, seemed more reckless than before; and afterward, he slept as though slain.  She lay beside him, watching the fire die slowly away.  A log burst in a shower of sparks, rekindling a flame in the midst of the embers.
At sunrise, Rulan was roused by a whirring of wings.  A bird with a golden crown and scarlet feathers leaped across her line of vision to the top of a nearby thornbush.  Even wrapped in slumber, she recognized it: the crimson bird, the herald of good fortune.  Comforted by the omen, she put her face into the warmth of Pao An's neck and gave herself up to sleep.

When she awoke again, there was no bird, no man beside her.  Only the marks of his fingers in the dirt mapping imaginary islands floating in a phantom sea.