Upsetting the Balance

Liu Han smiled back across the table at the dingy Peking rooming house. She sipped tea, nibbled at a rice cake, and said nothing. She’d been saying nothing ever since she’d let him know she had a good idea weeks before. He still had no notion what her idea was. She’d wanted to keep more control over it than he was willing to give: basically, she wanted to become one of the leaders in the Communists’ Peking underground. Nieh hadn’t been willing to pay that kind of price.

Beside him, Hsia Shou-Tao laughed raucously. “You sound like you’re in love with her, for heaven’s sake,” he said. Nieh glowered at him, too. Hsia thought of everything in terms of his crotch, not economics. But he also thought he knew how to get what he wanted. “If she won’t open up, we can always liquidate her. No one would miss her, that’s certain.”

Nieh glanced over to Liu Han to see if the threat had put her in fear. He didn’t think it had, and he was expert in gauging such things. She said, “If you kill me, you will never find out what I have in mind.”

“We don’t have to kill you,” Hsia said, his voice all the more frightening because he sounded so genial. “All we have to do is hurt you for a while.”

“Do what you want with me,” Liu Han said. “But who will trust you with his ideas if you torture me?”

That made Nieh wince. Mao had written that guerrillas should be like a fish concealed within the school of the people. If they scared the people away from them, they would stand alone and exposed to the wrath of the little scaly devils. Sighing, he made his first retreat: “I will give you what you ask, but only if I think your idea is good enough.”

“Then you will tell me you think it is bad, ignore me, and use it anyhow,” Liu Han said.

“I could do that now: make all the promises in the world and then break them,” Nieh Ho-T’ing reminded her. “If you want your idea used against the little devils, sooner or later you will have to tell me what it is. And if you want your reward, you will have to trust a promise that you will get it.”

Liu Han looked thoughtful when he was through. But then she said, “Any time anyone has promised me anything-men and little scaly devils both-it’s turned out to be a lie. Why should you be any different?”

“Because we are comrades in a fight against the same enemy,” Nieh answered. “If you show me a way to hurt the scaly devils, youwill be rewarded. The People’s Liberation Army does not exploit the women who fight side by side with their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers.” He kicked Hsia Shou-Tao under the table. He had spoken sound doctrine, and wished Hsia were better at living up to it.

Hsia, for a wonder, kept his mouth shut. And, after keeping silent so long, Liu Han at last wavered. “I wish I could do this on my own,” she muttered. “Then I wouldn’t have to believe another pack of lies. But if I want to hurt the little devils-and I do-I need help. So-”

She talked for some time. The longer Nieh Ho-T’ing listened to her low-voiced description of what she had in mind, the more impressed he got. Hsia Shou-Tao said “A beast show!” in disparaging tones, but Nieh kicked him again. He wanted to hear every word of this.

When Liu Han finished, he dipped his head to her and said, “I think you may deserve everything you have been saying you wanted for so long. If it works as it should, this will let us get in among the scaly devils: to spy certainly, and maybe, as you say, to kill.”

“That is what I want,” Liu Han said. “I want the little devils to know I did it to them, too. They will know my name. It is in their records, and the machines that think for them will find it. They stole my child, my tiny daughter. Maybe I can force them to give her back.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing sent her a severe look. “And if they returned the child to you, you would abandon the campaign against the scaly imperialist aggressors?” he demanded. If she said yes to that, he would throw her out of the rooming house and think hard about having her liquidated. The dialectic of the class struggle was more important than merely personal concerns.

But Liu Han shook her head. “Nothing would make me stop fighting the little scaly devils. I owe them too much for that. You Communists seem to be doing more to fight them than anyone except maybe the Japanese, and I hate the eastern devils, too. So I will work with you whether or not I have my child-but I want her back.”

“Good enough,” Nieh said, relaxing. Injuries suffered at the hands of oppressors often led folk to the People’s Liberation Army. Once they learned the true doctrines the Communist Party espoused, they were likely to remain loyal members all their lives, and to be eager to help others escape from similar maltreatment.