six people when we don’t have enough to eat right now? Can our factories employ another million six people when we’ve got thirty percent unemployment?”
“Can our future sustain another three million people in the next generation after that?” Zhu called out.
Sally Chou was sweating and exhausted by the end of this rally. Zhu didn’t remember what happened to the heckler in the back.
New campaigns were announced each spring over bowls of millet gruel at the long plywood tables.
“Women must be the first to understand that having children—skip or natch—is a privilege, not a right,” Sally Chou said. “Women must sacrifice that privilege for the children. Everyone’s children. For the future! As the cosmicists say, ‘To give is best.’”
“Are you a cosmicist, Sally?” Zhu asked.
“We can learn from the cosmicists,” Sally said, a little evasively. “We must all learn that a sustainable future depends on the sacrifices we make now. Let us make those sacrifices gladly! Make them out of compassion! We must win the hearts and minds of our women. All the world watches mother China. Our China must not fail!”
Our mother China. We, the women. Zhu eagerly embraced these words and ideas. If all the world watched mother China, then all the world watched her, too. Zhu, the abandoned skipchild, now a Daughter of Compassion.
The compound was comprised of a scrawny vegetable garden, a fishpond, a small ugly office high-rise, a mediocre medical clinic, a depressing dining hall, an uninspiring recreation room, and a dormitory and communal baths. Zhu thought the compound was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen. Especially the shrine to Kuan Yin.
Kuan Yin was the patroness of the Daughters of Compassion. A five-thousand-year-old goddess, a mystic presence, an intellectual principle, a metaphor, a heroine of fables, a source of aphorisms, a philosophical statement.
“Who is Kuan Yin?” Zhu asked as she sat cross-legged on the bare concrete floor. She gazed at three statuettes on the altar—a seated woman of celadon, a standing woman with a baby on her hip, and a crouching woman in golden armor, her arms raised for battle. She wasn’t sure which aspect of Kuan Yin she preferred—the priestess, the mother, or the warrior.
“She is the bodhisattva of compassion,” Sally Chou said. “She who hears all pleas.”
In one fable, Kuan Yin was a hunter, like the Greek goddess Artemis, who offered women the spiritual life as an alternative to marriage. In another fable, she was an innocent girl whose parents abused her, then sentenced her to death. Each time the executioner took pity on her, and she survived. Then, when the parents fell ill, Kuan Yin carved strips of flesh from her arms and made them meat soup, which nourished the parents and saved their lives.
Zhu was enraged by this story, but Sally Chou whispered, “The Daughters of Compassion are strips of flesh. We are the sacrifice.”
Zhu nodded and embraced the Cause. She threw herself into the life of abstinence and discipline. And she never ate meat after that. Meat of any sort—red flesh, fish, or fowl—tasted too much like a sacrifice.
* * *
Zhu gains the crest of Montgomery Street, troubled by Muse and perplexed by the cigar wagon. She gasps for breath. The Archivists insisted she wear a corset for authenticity. A corset gives the female figure a distinctive curvy look, even a woman as thin as Zhu. At her most anorexic, her waist measured twenty-one inches. Wearing the corset, she’s managed to squeeze her waist down to eighteen inches. Hah. Maybe she hasn’t pulled the laces tight enough. The advertisements promise a reduction of five inches.
She runs her hand down her side. She remembers Daniel circling his hands around her corseted waist, delighting in the bound portion of her body.
A very troubled young man. And very much a man of his times.
Should she begrudge him that? Or try to save him from his ignorance?
Oh, man. There she goes again, trying to save the world and everyone in it.
Not only does a corset restrict a woman’s breathing, but the undergarment compromises her digestive tract, her bowels, her uterus, her liver, her kidneys, her bladder. The exoskeletal construction weakens a woman’s midriff muscles to the point that some long-term corset wearers can’t sit up or stand without the support of their whalebone stays.
“Braced for the day,” Jessie cheerfully says.
Zhu sneezes at the corner of Montgomery and Broadway where street sweepers bend to their task. A man in a sombrero leads the way, driving a one-horse Studebaker wagon. Bolted to the wagon bed is