Ashes on Red Paper

Ashes on Red Paper

Where the flames of war rage, longing unsent has already turned to ash

When autumn rain washed over Shanghai in 1925, soaking the forty-seventh letter she had never sent, Su Wanqing finally saw the end of a red cord peeking from the pocket of Fu Chengan’s military uniform. It was the lovers’ knot she had tied to her farewell letter, now wrapped around a Japanese secret police kill order.

From their first meeting by the Suzhou Creek, when a white horse trampled their leaflets, to the moment they lifted a crying infant from the blood-filled air-raid shelter in Chongqing, eight hundred gold-flecked letters passed between them over ten years, only to be reduced to ashes by the war. She once took a poisoned drink meant for him at a night club in Zhabei; he once suppressed the compromising photographs of her in the South Manchuria Railway archives. Yet the deepest knives were always hidden in their most intimate embraces. A kiss behind the revolving doors of the Paramount Ballroom concealed a listening device; beneath the wedding bed in their apartment on Avenue Joffre lay a demolition map. Even on the night Nanjing fell, as they clung to each other with desperate abandon, the guns at their lower backs burned hotter than their racing hearts.

When the Order of the Blue Sky and White Sun pressed into their clasped palms, and Miaojiang love curses gnawed at the blood they shared, they finally understood the cruelest curse of lovers in a time of chaos: I know you spent seven years undercover, bearing eight layers of disguise; you pity me for infiltrating the tiger’s den and surviving nine brushes with death, yet in our tenth year, we still choose to pull the triggers on each other. A bronze casket slowly opens beneath the Huangpu River, revealing a scorched mandarin-duck pillow, a marriage certificate riddled with bullet holes, and a letter neither of them ever read. It begins, “Seeing these words is like seeing you,” but is signed, “May we meet again in another life, though we were wrong in this one.”