The Jasmine Path

Author’s Note: This piece is my most “successful” in the traditional sense— I won a major competition with this piece, having to include a character that could be identified as a ‘power walker.’ I think for the prompt, it was a creative twist, but it isn’t my best work. I blush somehwhat upon reflection. The story, born from my admiration of authors such as Cixin Liu, takes place in China during the Culural Revolution. I did my best research and aimed to be respectful, but the piece has been accused of being anti-China propaganda, and I cannot blame the reader who comes to that conclusion when considering the broader cultural climate in my home country. However, it is now an fixed part of my authorial history, and I cannot hide it. I can only offer that this piece came from a sincere place of love for Chinese history and modern Chinese authors, and that the story is not meant to address the political realities of the moment by rather the perseverance and bravery of an older sister. Thank you.

The Jamine Path

What a beautiful jasmine flower, 

What a beautiful jasmine flower. 

Minzhu grunted, her knees nearly buckling. She held her sister on her back, arms strained and shoulders spasming from hours of carrying. Early morning moisture clung to her skin; the gunmetal sky promised a cold sunrise. In stolen shoes, her feet blistered and bled. Blood blossomed from the wound in her thigh. The muddy path wove ahead between sodden rice paddies and brown, dead fields, vanishing into a dark horizon. 

On Minzhu’s back, Wenhua coughed, her tiny chest grating. 

Time was running out. 

Minzhu squatted, lowering her sister into a patch of grass. She almost collapsed from relief. Although Wenhua was tiny— seven years-old and undernourished— Minzhu was weak from months of hunger. Resting on her bony knees, the time she was once the fastest runner in her class felt like a dream; the same dream where her mother would sing as she held her baby sister and Minzhu drifted to sleep, clinging to those sweet, now-forbidden words. 

Lush with buds and blooms, 

Pure and fragrant.

Those were the lyrics of a song that belonged to an old China, a great sleeping giant that had woken to the drum of revolution. Smashed temples, burned books, and long red banners stretched out over her school walls: REJECT THE FOUR OLDS. All remnants of an oppressive and backwards past must be destroyed: old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. 

Old songs. 

Minzhu pulled a chipped canister from her satchel and took a brief drink, giving the last sips of fresh water to Wenhua. Her little face was flushed, a rash creeping up her scrawny chest and shoulders. Minzhu tied back her little sister’s loose, dark hair with a red scarf and wiped dribble from her chin. 

“How much longer?” Wenhua whimpered. 

Minzhu glanced down the road.

“Today,” assured Minzhu. “We will go to the big hospital— we’ll get medicine and you’ll feel all better.”

She scooped up her sister again and bit back a groan. Her back ached like an old woman’s despite being thirteen years-old. Hard labor had worn Minzhu like thin leather. 

Minzhu marched on. The path had a familiar bitterness. After the loss of her parents, she had been forced to toil in the countryside in order to be reeducated, walking this long road from the city to the mountains. Her parents, professors at the city university, had been dragged to the streets and found guilty by the mob of being intellectual traitors to the nation. The Red Guard then tied signs around their necks and beat them to death. 

Her parents had never been able to lie about their beliefs. 

Minzhu had envied the Red Guard when she was younger. Bold and irreverent, the youths did as they pleased, purging the city from ideological filth and ushering in a new era. Minzhu once confessed her desire to become a guard to her father, fervently quoting from her copy of the Little Red Book.

“... ‘We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun,’” she recited perfectly. “Baba, we will only see peace if we fight the evils in our country and weed out corruption. That’s what the Red Guard does!”

Her father was quiet a while before he replied: “Does the fire put out the fire?”

The political blasphemy had sent shockwaves up Minzhu’s spine; he could have been imprisoned for that rebuttal— it was a reactionary way of thinking. However, for reasons she was yet to understand, the conversation had left Minzhu feeling ashamed. 

Now, in a gross twist of fate, Minzhu wore the uniform of a Red Guard, pulled from the body of a girl not much older than herself.

One foot in front of the other. Minzhu’s breath was short. Each step was a thousand needles from foot to hip. Never had walking been such an agony. Wenhua’s shallow breathing counted each long second. 

Pale sunlight glistened over shallow, murky water. Few birds dared to sing. Gray concrete buildings sprouted along the skyline, and Minzhu’s heart leapt. 

“So close,” she whispered. “Stay with me, little sister.”

An engine roared, a speck in the distance growing as it barreled down the road, spraying mud. Minzhu’s stomach dropped at the sight of a red flag flapping wildly from the back of the truck. Minzhu did not slow her walk, forcing her legs faster.

The truck bed was full of uniformed youths, faces thin and eyes sharp. In each pair of arms they cradled black rifles. 

The vehicle braked some yards ahead, a couple of the youths jumping down. They sauntered towards her. 

A reedy girl with chopped hair barked: “State your name, comrade!” 

“Li Weihong!” Minzhu croaked, taking the name from her stolen passport. “I’ve come from Gaoshan village. Counterrevolutionaries attacked, and I was wounded. I came to bring word of the traitors.” 

“That lines up with what we heard from Comrade Wang,” a male guard confirmed, “but what about the little girl?” He gestured with his gun. 

Minzhu licked her cracked lips. “She’s the daughter of a fallen comrade, and she’s very ill.” 

Weaving lies, the threads beginning to tangle. Wenhua weighed on her back like a pallet of bricks.

  The boy started to step forward, but the girl held out an arm. 

“Wait,” she said, eyes narrowed on Minzhu, whose heart thundered in her ears. “Confirm to us that you are a true revolutionary.”

“How?” 

“Answer— according to Chairman Mao, what is the truth each communist must know about authority?” 

The girl had quoted incorrectly, but Minzhu didn’t correct her. Her mind reached to the past, back to the days where she had been able to study, the days when she and Wenhua would play in the garden and dance to their mother’s piano. When her father’s steady hand guided her brush through calligraphy strokes. Back to when the truth mattered. 

“It grows from the barrel of a gun,” she said. The answer tasted sour. 

The girl hesitated before giving a nod. “Good answer, comrade. We can’t help you get to the city— we have to go deal with the situation in Gaoshan. Will you make it by yourselves?”

“I think so.” Minzhu knew the answer didn’t matter. 

“Best of luck, comrade.”

When the Red Guard climbed on their truck and left, Minzhu’s limbs flooded with relief. In a small way, she had done what her father and mother could not. Now she must save Wenhua.

Minzhu trudged on. Her uniform grew soaked with her and Wenhua’s sweat. Her boots sank in the mud, each step felt like lifting the sky. Her mouth tasted paper dry.

The city walls took shape ahead of her, plastered with red slogans. Red banners hung limply above the gate. It was a shell of what it used to be, wooden homes replaced by concrete blocks overgrown with weeds and climbing vines. At the sight of the sun-washed hospital just across the border, Minzhu felt a rush that coursed through her legs as she limped faster, a song escaping from between her lips: 

Let me gather flowers, 

To give someone I love, 

Oh jasmine flower, 

What a beautiful jasmine flower. 

Wenhua stirred at the sound. They were home.