My mother was not very colourful; she was always grey. After she married my father, she had nothing of her own. She never spoke one on one to other men, and she never had letters come from afar. When I was three or four, the president of the marketing cooperative, Mr Ma, came to our house and spoke to my mother in the bedroom. My father was still working on the river at that time. I heard Mr Ma ask about Xiazhi, and my mother said he was so wild she could never be sure where he had gone. Mr Ma said, ‘Xiazhi looks more and more like me the older he gets.’

My mother desperately warned Mr Ma not to say such ridiculous things, shooing him out. She remained in her room crying after he left.

I agreed with what Mr Ma had said. Xiazhi really did look like him, with a round face and narrow eyes. Once when I was quarrelling with Xiazhi over an eraser, he said I was nothing but a foundling my mother had picked up, so I retorted, ‘You belong to the Ma family.’

When my mother heard that, she rushed over and whipped me, then passed me the eraser. I was very proud to have received a beating and the prize. I had not started school at the time. The eraser had such a strange fragrance, and I eventually chewed it to nothing. Xiazhi complained to my mother, but she did not punish me. She simply sat there, lost in thought.

Whenever my mother grew a little melancholy, I became especially obedient, voluntarily helping her with the housework. When she wanted to paste cardboard, I handed her the paste. When she wanted to mix putty with 66 pesticide powder, I shovelled the ash for her. When she wanted to raise silkworms, I helped her pick the mulberry leaves. When she planted pepper bushes, I watered them. When she cooked, I fed the fire under the stove. Year after year, the relationship between my mother and me was quietly built this way, and it became too deep to fathom. My mother was the person I loved most in the whole world. She was a huge tree, and I was a sapling growing in her shade. When Mr Ma came around to my mother again, I would put caterpillars on his neck, or spit in his teacup, or let the air out of his bicycle tyres. Mr Ma seemed to have learned my tactics, so he did not come to our house again. When he passed by our door, he would only take a quick glance inside.

Before long, my father returned from his work on the riverboats. He and Mr Ma had a good relationship. They would often stand together under the Chinaberry tree, chatting and sharing cigarettes. Mr Ma would say he had some good-quality tobacco and invite my father to smoke it. My father would light a cigarette for him. They always had lengthy chats while they smoked. My father was macho, while Mr Ma was gentle and frail. He did not lose to my father, but he was mellow, never in a hurry, and completely free of temper. He often carried his daughter on his shoulders and let her pick flowers or ripe fruit from the trees. I thought of how interesting it would be to have a father like Mr Ma.

Mr Ma’s daughter was my classmate all the way through middle school. She did not like to study, but she passed the exam to get into nursing school. After she graduated, she always wore a pink peaked cap, white uniform, white shoes, and a white mask, over which you could see only her narrow eyes. She would rub the patient’s hand, squeeze the blood vessel, and poke the infusion needle in. Nursing was a good profession. The nurses who worked in the better hospitals could have a meteoric rise, but Miaohong did not get into a higher ranked hospital. She was stuck in the county hospital, so she had a tough time succeeding. She married one of the hospital’s gynaecologists, a bespectacled fellow who had washed his hands so often they were now ghostly white. At the time, the women in the village did not know anything about gynaecology. When they found out what it was, they blushed and said talking about such a thing would shame them to death.

In private, the village women often spoke of Ma’s daughter’s marriage to a gynaecologist, snickering over it. My mother was one of their ranks. She consciously believed that women were beneath men. Their underclothes should never see the light of day. If I hung such items out where they could be seen by a passerby, my mother scolded me fiercely and quickly put them out of sight, leaving only my father’s and brother’s pants to flip about in the wind.

Chuntian was greatly affected by my mother. When she first started wearing a bra, I was curious about the little garment, so took it out where everyone could see it. Humiliated, she cried and hit me. In an act of revenge, I once peeped at her while she bathed. Half a red brick came flying out of the washroom, striking me squarely on the hind end. I cried hysterically until my mother punished Chuntian. Even years later, every time Chuntian mentioned this, it saddened her. She said my mother had protected me ever since I was small, and that my father also treated me better than he did her. I felt quite guilty and indebted to her after that.

When our family built the new house, we cut down the Chinaberry tree that had always stood next to the door. This humble, useless tree was actually quite pretty, especially when the flowers bloomed into purple cloud clusters. When the wind blew, they fell like snowflakes. My mother wore a cloth tied around her waist as she sat under the Chinaberry tree rubbing rapeseed, pounding beans, mending the soles of our shoes, or knitting sweaters. I had fallen in love for the first time under that tree, as Tang Linlu played his guitar.

The tree had grown when my father was away from home. He had no special attachment to it, so he cut the tree, dug up the roots, and used it all to reinforce a ring fence. I told my mother, ‘You should stop him from cutting down the tree.’

She said, ‘There’s no use keeping it.’

She spoke so dully that I could only bear the pain in solitude. I did not tell my mother that, for me, the tree was connected to her. I was already in university at the time. I should have had much to share with my mother, but I still continued in my old ways.

This part of my family history may not seem very important. After all, there was no longer any way to verify whether Xiazhi’s surname was Li or Ma. I even doubted my own suspicions. Perhaps I felt that my mother’s life was too monotonous, and having one such fantasy would at least prove she was a woman of flesh and blood. It would also prove that she had once cultivated a lively lust, and that she had experienced moments of ecstasy. It was true – I could hardly imagine how my young mother, like the Virgin Mary, could have survived those lonely nights. Of course, in our twenty-first century village, gynaecology is no longer a taboo for women, and stolen pleasures are commonplace. Women say all the dirty words under the sun out loud, their underclothes fluttering in the wind like flags, and when their amour is exposed, they no longer feel suicidal.