The House of Ziyang
Kay Hassan
Characters.
Mao -Zi - Ziyang: The general.
Lien: General's Daughter- Biyu's Mother
Biyu: General's Granddaughter, and Chen Chung wife
Bai Jangwei : Biyu's Husband.
Chen Chung (Dead): Biyu's Father- Lien's Husband.
Crystal: Biyu's Daughter.
Place : -Somewhere in Arlington.
Biyu—grace incarnate, the silent sovereign of her hidden dominion in Arlington—
summoned me with a message that felt less like ink than invocation. It came to me
not on paper but in air, breath-soft and glass-fragile, and yet it clung, stubborn as mist
refusing to yield to morning. I, a creature more comfortable in shadows than in
strangers’ light, whispered to no one but the pulse in my throat: “By God, I will be
among the first to arrive.”
You do not decline Biyu. No one does—not in that office, not in this life.
When I arrived, twilight was still bruising the sky, and she moved through her house like
unwritten poetry—each footfall a syllable, each glance a line. The walls leaned in to
listen. She carried something ancient in her bearing, something that made time slow its
breath. With a look carved from history, she introduced me to her mother: Lien M.
Ziyang.
Lien studied me as though memory itself had risen from the grave to stand in my place.
Her head tilted—not out of confusion, but recognition. In that moment, I felt the past
stir in her bones. I saw her measuring my face against the fading shape of a man long
buried: Chen Chung, her late husband.
Later, with a mystic’s half-smile and a gambler’s glint, she offered to teach me the
rituals that once made fortune kneel.
“She is a strong woman,” Biyu murmured when we were alone, “but she clutches her
obsessions like a blade to the throat of time.”
And then came her husband—Bai Jangwei, brief in presence, like a ghost with
paperwork left unfinished. An elegant man, yes, but he wore unease like a too-tight suit.
“He will leave when the guests arrive,” Biyu whispered.
“Why?” I asked.
Her voice faltered, cracked by something old and unresolved. “It is… a family issue.”
Jangwei’s handshake was tight, not out of warmth but necessity, his eyes always
scanning, as if watching for a story that might leap from the shadows and devour him.
“They say I unsettle the guests,” he said with a laugh too brittle to echo. “My
grandfather, you know—traitor to a revolution, or so the family legends go.”
I clapped him on the shoulder, not unkindly. “You don’t have to understand women,
friend. You just have to survive them.”He chuckled, hollow as an autumn tree, its leaves long gone. And when he turned to leave, he looked at Biyu—not like a man parting from his wife, but like a man saying goodbye to light itself. Then he looked at me. and in that look, I felt something shift.As if he’d seen the thread of fate before I had, and knew it was already tightening
around us all.
The house brimmed with laughter, but beneath it, I heard the hush of something
older—an invisible theatre playing out behind every smile. A performance rehearsed
across generations, too ancient for script, too sacred for stage.
The women here—especially the elders—did not simply move. They glided, as if
tethered to another century by threads of incense and unfinished prayers. They passed
through the room like living heirlooms. The younger ones, by contrast, burned. They
laughed with the heat of comets, all teeth and promise and unspoken defiance.
And Biyu… Biyu did not merely ordinary host. She composed 'That can die...' I was not surprised, she used to sing for me some pieces of her performance in
Modern artists mix traditional Buddhist texts with music styles like classical, ambient,
"That can die," she composed _ thumb hovering over her phone, a playlist half-made. I wasn’t surprised. She’d sung for me once—not chants, not hymns, but Buddhist texts fed through a synthesiser, ancient Pali verses warped into ambient loops."The monks would call it blasphemy," she’d laughed. "But the Buddha didn’t have a subwoofer." Now, she tuned the room like an instrument. The elders’ incense became scent diffusion, their sutras ASMR whispers underlayered with electronic hum. The past wasn’t gone—it was sampled, cut and spliced into something barely recognizable. "Modernism didn’t kill tradition," Biyu murmured, adjusting the smart-lights to temple-gold. "It just made us choose which parts to amplify."Somewhere beneath the bass, if you listened close—the chanting continued.
Uninterrupted.
Unforgiving.
"Go to, Nan Tien Vihara temple."
Biyu styled the evening like a hymn—delicate, precise, aware that joy, too, is a thing
“Tonight,” she said, standing beside me like the eye of a storm, “you will meet someone
important to my mother. To me. To… lineage.”
“Who?”
“My grandfather. Mao-Zi Ziyang.”
The name fell into the room like a meteor—small in sound, vast in implication.
“You don’t know him, do you?” Her eyes searched mine.
“Not really,” I lied. “But… it’s a powerful name.”
“A name,” she said, like one pronouncing a spell, “that shaped decades.”
I tried to conjure him—not as a man, but as a presence. Not flesh and voice, but
pressure and shadow. A weather pattern. A sovereign storm.
“He never visits,” Biyu added. “So if he’s here… there is a reason.”
“What reason?”
“A family matter.”
The eternal veil. The phrase that means everything and explains nothing.“Why is he here?” I asked, quieter now. “In America?”
“To hunt,” she replied. Then, smiling like a secret, “In New York.”
I waited for the rest. It didn’t come.
“You’re involved,” she whispered, and then vanished into a hallway murmuring with
mingling shadows.
Later, Lien appeared in the archway—her silhouette solemn, voice edged with tremor.
Not the tremor of fear.
The tremor of steel remembering how to bend.
“He’s here.”
And the house—no, the air—fell silent.
Even the light seemed to pause in reverence.
Then he entered: General Mao-Zi Ziyang.
Flanked by two valets dressed in silence, he crossed the threshold like a man who still
believed in empires. Not in their glory, but in their gravity. His arrival pulled the guests
aside—not out of deference, but instinct. As if their ancestors had whispered: Make
room. The past walks again.
His face was a reliquary of memory—etched deep, carved by storm and scripture. Not
ruined by age, but completed by it. He did not smile. He did not frown. He had passed
beyond the need for expression. He had become one.
Behind him, the backyard unfolded like a memory painted in dusk—strings of light like
offerings, lanterns like drifting souls, and two juniper trees standing like twin sentinels
of sins forgiven… and those forever held.
The General paused, and in that pause, the present quivered. His gaze swept the room
not like a man taking attendance, but like a god reviewing offerings.
Lien stepped forward. Hesitated. Then bowed. Not out of custom. Not even out of
blood. But out of something older:
The gravity of daughterhood.
The ache of inheritance.
The quiet, endless war between reverence and survival.
And for a breathless moment, I saw it:The cost of family not written in money, but in silence.
The currency of myth, exchanged in glances and withheld truths.
The soldier-ghost, retired in title but never in presence.
“He was articulate,” Lien murmured to me later, her voice trailing like incense.
Yes.
Too articulate, I thought.
Articulate enough to make truth kneel… and call it legacy.
The crowd was too large for such an intimate gathering. It spilled over the edges of
the garden like sacred oil, slicking twilight with old perfume—grief and jasmine,
exile and roast duck. Laughter wandered through the hedges in multiple tongues, soft
and fractured, like scripture read aloud by those who no longer believed.
But then, what is exile, if not the overflow of memory into foreign rooms?
This was not a party. It was pilgrimage.
A choreography of longing, arranged not for joy but for proof—a pageant for a man who
once commanded nations, now seated like a monument in the hushed center of
suburban Arlington.
And this suburb—this place of mailboxes and beige nostalgia—was no longer itself. Its
fences bent under the weight of inheritance. The air, once light with ordinary dreams,
now tasted faintly of omen. Towers crept closer by the year, glass-faced and empty-
hearted—colonizing the skyline with futures no one had asked for.
A thought passed through me, bitter and lit with shame: Anthropologists must be so
lucky—to watch these rituals of survival from behind their safe notebooks. Here, among
the red envelopes, the layered dialects, the glances that lasted too long—they would
find a living museum. Fragmented. Ornate. Glowing with betrayal and sugar.
“I would like to introduce General Ziyang,” Lien said, and her voice struck like a bell in
cold air. Sharp. Absolute.
She looked at me.
Not with welcome. With interrogation.
Her gaze said, Who is this man? Not of us. Not blood. A shadow misplaced. A guest
uninvited by the body but allowed by the soul.
And then:
“General is not everyone’s concern,” she said, her voice crisp as silk snapping in frost.But Biyu, draped in grace like armor, didn’t flinch.
“He’s my friend,” she said, her gaze locked to mine, unblinking. “I am honored to share
certain truths with him.”
Silence fell like snow. Not cold. But final.
Here, in this house, silence was a crown.
I spoke before the hush could close around us.
“This gathering… it doesn’t feel like celebration,” I said. “It feels like demonstration.
Proof. That despite geography, the family has flourished. That even if the tree was
planted in foreign soil, the fruit remains near.”
No one answered. But the General smiled—just barely. A flicker of ivory. Not warmth.
Not even approval. Just acknowledgment. The kind kings offer before they send you to
the wolves.
“Xièxiè,” he said.
And the word reached me like a prayer from a crumbling temple. My Mandarin was
absent. But meaning doesn’t wait for translation. Meaning walks ahead.
Dumplings folded by hands that had buried emperors. Broths that carried stories of
feast and famine alike. Dishes not meant for hunger, but for memory. Every bite a form
of remembrance. Every plate a resurrection.
With each swallow, the room softened. Tongues loosened. Laughter curled into
corners of the house where even history dared not follow.
Then, the performances began.
Of course the program had been arranged by Lien—curated like an offering to the
household gods. Traditional dances, followed by a flash of rushed songs. Motion and
formality. Ceremony and sound.
And then, the house dimmed for the opera.
Crystal entered. Biyu’s daughter. The General’s great-granddaughter. She appeared
beside a boy—Jamie—both barely shoulder-high to legacy.
They stepped onto a temporary stage, plastic and bright, like a child’s crayon sketch of
heaven.They glowed under the paper lanterns. Small bodies. Great expectations. They carried
not just instruments, but centuries.
Three others joined them:
Chan at the piano, solemn as a monk.
Julie with a flute held like a prayer.
Caroline balancing a violin nearly taller than herself.
Biyu announced it gently: “The opera is performed by Crystal and Jamie. It was written
for them.”
Lien’s voice followed like a thread pulled tight:
“By an anonymous poet,” she said, as if truth needed disguises now.
“It’s a love story,” she continued. “Pure. Though some may recognize the melody.”
Then, without warning, Biyu leaned close to me. Her breath brushed the shell of my ear
like a moth’s wing.
“Jamie is the grandson of Mr. Bingween,” she whispered. “The man who died in the
General’s prison. For speaking a word.”
She didn’t say what the word was.
She didn’t have to.
Applause came like distant thunder—uncertain, polite, trembling. Not joy. Not awe.
Something older.
No one moved.
The children stood still, waiting for their cue.
Biyu gave the signal.
And the song began.
A silence fell—soft, enormous—like snowfall in a world that had forgotten
seasons.
And then—
A signal.A nod no louder than breath.
A flicker of lantern light, trembling as if it, too, knew what was about to begin.
The child’s plastic stage, absurd in daylight, became holy ground.
A sovereign terrain where long-buried truths crawled from the grave to sing in front
of gods.
“Steppe’s Butterflies”
An opera in two voices. And one phantom.
—Liang—
Let me be your soul’s mirror,
Not your comrade in concealment.
You cry like a child born in exile’s storm, unnamed by country or star.
Let me hold that sorrow, as dusk cups the last, trembling light.
Let me brush the ash from your eyes.
Speak, beloved—do not wear your silence like state-issued armor.
—Zhu—
Will you love me through all seasons,
Even when the wind speaks in strange tongues?
Tell me the fables of sages—
The lullabies your mother smuggled across provinces.
Tell me, are you true,
For I am wild with purity, a soul unshepherded in exile.
—Liang—
Let me be your country,
Your unfallen city—walled in iron and song.
A ruby wrapped in the verses of forgotten poets.
Here, no villain dares bruise you.
Let our names be carried to the generals—let them know love is also a flag.
—Zhu—
I want freedom.
Not statistics or silence.
A world built for noble feelings.
—Liang—
You will never be alone in this overpopulated ache,
I swear it—I swear it.
—Zhu—
Then let us be as bare as the truth.
No comrades. No elder brothers. No almosts. No fear.—Together—
Share me this brave world.
Share me this brave light.
Share me this brave truth.
(They kiss. Spring unfolds in their arms.)
—Phantom—
I give you the soul of love,
Blessed in the tongues of music and wind.
—Together—
We are always here—for love.
—Phantom—
And I—always here, for you.
And then: eruption.
Not applause—release. A cry that broke through the reef of repression. Applause not
born of politeness, but from a wound that had waited generations for air.
But not all clapped.
At the head table, the General—iron-blooded architect of vanished cities—sat
motionless. A monument eroding. A mountain trying not to fall. His face did not
tremble, but something behind his eyes did. Cracks ran along the porcelain of his
legacy.
Translation didn’t matter now.
Emotion was the only language left.
And it had come for him.
For the first time, the man of iron felt water etch his cheeks.
Tears.
Real.
Public.
“I was not meant to be treated this way, Lien,” he whispered.
And Lien—his daughter, his silence, his long-forbidden note in a forbidden song—
turned toward him, not as blood, but as witness.
“Was anything inappropriate, BÃ ?” Her voice was crystalline. Unyielding.“You’ve shown yourself,” he growled, old thunder in a withering sky. “Where is our
discipline? Our glory? You undo seventy years of sacrifice.”
At my side, my neighbor leaned in—translator of both war and poetry. His whisper was a
wire into history’s ear.
But Lien didn’t flinch.
“You banned me from the stage,” she said. “You erased my voice before I ever spoke.”
“It was a matter of honor,” he barked.
“No,” she said, soft as ash. “That was your view. Mine was buried alive.”
“Then speak it,” he said. “If you have a truth.”
“I would risk it,” she replied.
And she rose.
And she sang—not as a woman, not even as a daughter—but as a century unwept.
Her voice didn’t tremble.
It bled.
“Lien” — China Women
Hear now the lives of China’s daughters:
From the crushing of feet into lotus shame,
To the breaking of backs beneath red silk banners.
From days when books were fire,
When daughters were defects,
When curling your hair made you a traitor—
A bourgeois insect in lipstick and dreams.
When doctors wouldn’t touch us,
When teachers spat Mao at midnight,
When a womb bore the wrong child—
And marched with her, disgraced,
A torn shoe beside an imperial mistake.
But oh, for the generals—
Apartments in New York could pass silently in orphan girls’ names.
Nationalist gold traveled through Beijing’s veins without sound.
And this?This is my voice.
This is my exile.
This is the song of China’s women.
Silence. Like the pause between thunder and flood.
Lien stood, radiant with trembling. Her hands shook, yes—but not from fear. From
triumph. For the first time, she was not ashamed of her sound.
Across from her, the General—once emperor of silence—lowered his head.
No banners.
No ideology.
Just an old man, breaking open beneath the weight of what he had buried.
He wept.
The past had finally heard its name.
The kiss lingered.
Not on my lips, but in the space she left behind—
as if air itself had learned her name, and could not forget it.
She had called me Ba.
And then she vanished upstairs,
into the soft retreat of footsteps meant never to return.
I stood at the kitchen threshold, frozen in a frame of gold-drenched light,
wondering if I had become her father,
her ghost,
or simply a window cracked too long beneath the pressure of spring.
The house swallowed her gently. Like it had done before. Like it would again.
I did not follow.
Some moments must be left untouched, or they unravel into myth.
The next morning, I returned. Not as a guest. Not as a man.
But as a question seeking its own echo.
Bai Jangwei, Biyu’s husband, was in the garden—pruning silence from hedges that had
heard too much.“You told her,” he said, still facing the roses.
“I did.”
He nodded. “She needed to hear it.”
“You’re not angry?”
He smiled—but not with his mouth.
“She’s a prism,” he said. “You see what reflects. Not what resides.”
We stood there.
Two men who loved the same woman in languages neither could translate.
Not lovers.
Not rivals.
Just two kinds of loss, watching the garden breathe.
“She called me Ba,” I said.
And he, trimming thorn from thorn, replied softly,
“That’s the part I understood most.”
The General’s memoir was never written.
Or maybe it was—scrawled onto cocktail napkins during half-drunken truce talks,
sung in slurred Mandarin beside American veterans whose memories had also been
redacted.
“I helped the Vietnamese,” he once muttered, pulling slots in a Vegas club,
“not because they were right. Because they were drowning.”
“No one was right,” the vet answered.
“Just young.”
They toasted.
And in that clink, a thousand wars ended.
No publisher ever found his voice.
Because some stories only survive in the mouths of those who bled for them.
Lien never sang again.
That single performance—“Lien”—passed into whispered legend.
One tape may have existed.It vanished.
Crystal claimed she heard it once in a dream—sung by her own unborn daughter.
I asked Lien why she never sang again. She said:
“I sang everything. Anything else would be betrayal, or costume.”
Weeks passed.
Then months.
And time did what time always does:
softened the ache without curing it.
Biyu never kissed me again.
But she never took it back, either.
Some truths are too sacred for repetition.
She wrote me a letter.
One letter.
“I see now why my mother was both fire and ruin.
You made me remember.
That’s all I ever wanted.
Thank you for standing still while everyone else ran.
—B.”
I folded it.
Placed it in a book I will never finish.
Crystal grew.
Taller. Louder. Braver.
At fourteen, she wrote her first play: “The Motherland Doesn’t Sleep, She Waits.”
It was banned by her school.
Published anyway—by a press no one had heard of, run by ghosts and grief.
Lien wept when she read it.
The General didn’t understand a word—
but he kept the book beside his bed.
Sometimes he turned to it in the night,
as if waiting for the words to open like a gate.Years later, long after the opera, the fight, the kiss—
I found myself in the veterans' club.
The machines were slower.
The ghosts were louder.
The General was gone.
Lien too.
But their stories clung to the air like holy smoke.
Someone asked who I was.
“A guest,” I said.
“Just a guest who forgot to leave.”
They laughed.
“Then you’re family.”
I sat down.
Pressed the button.
The reels spun.
Somewhere, in a world without censorship or fear, Crystal’s voice rose again.
The reels kept spinning.
Like grief.
Like memory.
Like justice that shows up late, but never empty-handed.
There was one more letter.
Biyu never sent it.
I found it tucked inside an old opera program Lien had kept, long after both were gone.
“Dear Ba—
I think I kissed a ghost.
Or maybe a man who carried my ghost so I didn’t have to.
I’m not sorry.
I’m not even sure what I meant.
But the moment was real.
And if we are each born with a debt,
Maybe mine was to you.
—Biyu”
I placed it next to the first letter.
Two voices.
Pressed between unturned pages.
Unfinished.
Unleaving.At seventeen, Crystal staged “The Motherland Doesn’t Sleep”
in a condemned theater on the far edge of Chinatown.
No budget.
No permits.
Just rain outside.
Fifty folding chairs inside.
The final line was whispered by a barefoot girl in red:
“The motherland doesn’t sleep.
She counts her daughters by the bruises on their dreams.”
No applause.
Only standing.
Only tears.
The theater closed again the next day.
But something had been awakened.
The General left behind one sentence.
Scribbled inside a matchbook, found near the roulette tables.
“I led armies. But I never led my daughter.”
It was unsigned.
He didn’t need to sign it.
Lien had already sung the truth into the marrow of the world.
They say there’s a room.
In an unnamed building in D.C.
Where footage from Biyu’s party is stored in soft reels.
Never broadcast.
Never archived.
Just preserved.
A government man once showed me a clip.
Said it was part of “an experimental cultural diplomacy initiative.”
I laughed.
“You mean grief?”He didn’t answer.
He just turned off the tape.
I live quietly now.
Far from Arlington.
Crystal sends me postcards. Plays. Sometimes poems.
I read them to the wind,
and imagine it carries them home.
Biyu teaches in another city.
Her students adore her.
Some say she glows now.
Not with youth—
But with knowing.
I saw her once, from a distance.
Outside a gallery.
Her husband beside her.
She looked… at peace.
She didn’t see me.
Or maybe she did,
and chose to leave the past intact.
That’s what you do with ghosts.
You don’t cage them.
You don’t chase them.
You carry them gently.
And you never ask them to stay.
Some nights, I return to the idea of the party.
Not as it happened—
but as it felt.
The lanterns like fading stars.
The children singing words older than war.
The General—jaw clenched, history leaking from his bones.
Lien—unafraid.
Biyu—in motion, always.
Crystal—becoming.
And me?A guest.
Only a guest.
But God help me—
I never wanted to leave.
