I WAS LIKE a hibernating animal that winter, shrinking into myself in my room and secretly licking my wounds. I rarely stepped out into the backward town, and in the middle school, where every teacher was living the same mundane life, I couldn’t find anyone I could confide in. No one ever visited me. After work, I would shut my plank door and then spend most of my evening lying in bed, staring at the window and watching it getting darker and darker outside. My books were tossed all over the cement floor. Students’ papers and exams were scattered about on the table. I had lost all interest in life.
I didn’t understand how Boss Pan could just walk into my life and then walk away with my innocence. I had had hopes that he would love me, marry me even, and I had given him the most precious thing I had.
I often touched my abdomen and could hardly believe there had once been a life inside. It was gone so quickly, just like Pan. I felt devastated yet relieved. I knew I had never loved either of them. I didn’t miss them, but I felt as if they had taken a big chunk out of me.
In the poisonous silence of those lonely nights, I saw that I was splitting into two people. By day, I was an elevated and upright teacher; but when the sun went down, I became an anguished, angry girl who just wanted to destroy everything, including herself.
The New Year came. I returned to the Shen Hamlet. My mother insisted that I go to the barbershop in Zhenze and get my hair done. You are an honored teacher now, and you should make yourself look decent and different from us country folks, she told me. I sat in the chair and let the barber put a ridiculous amount of styling gel on my hair so that it stood up on top of my head like the Eiffel Tower. I looked at myself in the mirror and then turned away.
Outside the window, garbage blew in the wind. I watched a man in a beat-up leather jacket come into the shop, bringing a gust of cold air with him. He sat down, and soon the barber’s apprentice started to blow-dry his hair. The stranger prattled in a loud voice over the noise of the dryer about how he was going to motorcycle to Wujiang in the afternoon. That was thirty kilometers away, and it was freezing out. Everyone in the shop thought the idea was ridiculous, but he shrugged them off.
The stranger caught my eye a couple of times. I kept my head low and ignored him. He was not bad-looking, I noted. Suddenly a desire for revenge overtook me. Before I even realized what I was doing, I turned to him and asked, “Hey, Big Brother, mind giving me a ride? I’m going back to Ba Jin this afternoon, and I can catch a transfer bus in Wujiang.”
An hour later, I was sitting on the back seat of his motorcycle, and we were speeding down the asphalt road. Nobody wanted to be on a motorcycle in January when the sharp wind cut your face. Certainly nobody wanted to be on a motorcycle driven by a stranger. But I didn’t care. I moved closer to him and put my hands in his jacket pockets. The leather was cold as ice when it touched my skin, but strangely it made me smile. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted. It just felt like there had been a small flame toying with my heart and nobody in the whole world cared. I was alone now, so I decided to play with it.
I took the stranger to the karaoke club where Boss Pan and I used to go. We snuggled together on the same leather couch where I had sat on many other nights, and we sang “Loving Birds Going Home Together.” The thought of Pan’s friend who worked at the club telling him that I was with another man made me feel triumphant. I was just a People’s Teacher who couldn’t risk going to Pan’s factory to cry and scream. But I had my own body, the only thing that belonged to me, so why not wreck it, I told myself. I was already a broken shoe anyway.
I didn’t plan the night out, but I ended up taking him to my dorm room and offering him the bunk bed above mine. There were a couple of minutes of silence after I turned off the light, and then I heard his voice wavering in the darkness: “I want to come down.”
When he crawled into my bed and climbed on top of me, I didn’t feel anything. He started to take off my clothes. I didn’t refuse. He moved his hand around gently and slowly touched off the desire in my body. It was still painful when he penetrated me, though, and the pain didn’t have time to go away before he finished off on my stomach. I frowned at the slimy fluid and wiped it away. Then I hugged him. I hadn’t enjoyed myself, but I realized that this was what I needed—to be close to someone, to lie in someone’s arms, even if I didn’t know the person.
Yet in the morning, I felt ashamed. Thankfully, he left at dawn, telling me he’d come back that night. As I biked to the school, I saw the bad me—the slut—scampering off the street like a frightened rat. As soon as I finished giving my lesson, I hopped back on my bike and pedaled to the local post office. I grabbed the public phone and dialed the number he had left. A clear and soft voice answered at the pager station. I told the lady hastily, “Please send ‘Don’t come tonight, or ever.’”
That night, I returned to my empty dorm room. I stood in the middle of the floor and couldn’t stand the sight of the bed where my bad side had taken control of me. I knew I couldn’t live here any more. Sooner or later, something, whether it was the deadly lonely quiet nights or my troubled thoughts, was going to drive me crazy.
The next day, I requested that the school move me to one of the brick rooms behind the abandoned classroom building, even closer to the water’s edge. These rooms were so rundown and sunken into the riverbank that nobody wanted to live there except for the acidic female Teacher Wang. The school approved my request immediately.
After pulling all the weeds from the bottom of the walls and the gaps between the bricks, I stood a thin bamboo board upright in the middle of the room, separating it into two sections. My tottering desk went in the front section, and I purchased a petroleum gas stove to go with it. The rear section became my bedroom. I was happy with my new home, even though the floor was so uneven on top of the muddy ground that I could barely make my bed stable. I had to be extremely careful, walking around, to avoid turning my ankles.
Though the honking boats seemed to be sailing only an inch from my head, I slept soundly that first night, something I hadn’t been able to do for a long time. In my new room, hidden from the world, I was able to breathe freely again. Nobody, neither Boss Pan nor the stranger, could find me here, and I could just hide in my cave and fight the bad me—the slut.
But I underestimated her strength. I couldn’t forget the sound of karaoke, the smell of rice wine, and the flashing disco ball that Boss Pan had gotten me used to. They became especially alluring in the evenings in my dark, damp brick room by the water. Loneliness was swallowing me up like a beast. Finally one night I wandered to the only club in town. As a young unmarried teacher, I was welcomed by people and invited to sing a song for free. The applause at the end of the song intoxicated me.
I started going to the club almost every night. Though I couldn’t always afford to pay for songs to sing, time flew by for me in the smoke and clamor. Boss Pan began to fade from my mind. I became familiar with the local businessmen, as well as the hoodlums who hung out in the club. I smiled to the businessmen and ignored the hoodlums, but my eyes couldn’t stop chasing after them secretly, even though I knew I should have been looking for a good man, someone with whom I’d be proud to be seen in broad daylight.
A man soon caught my attention, a strange man who only appeared in the night, walking soundlessly on his heels. He had bangs that covered his temples, and he had longer fingernails than any woman I knew. His oddness entranced me. I’d hear him singing Leslie Chueng songs, all of which I knew by heart, in his rich, deep voice, and my body would tingle. No one else at the club could ever sing Chueng’s songs as well or pronounce Cantonese as clearly as he did. His name was Hao. He was the son of a rich businessman, and he was known as a bad seed.
I hid in the club’s shadows and watched him singing. He stood in the spotlight, with one hand clutching the microphone and another holding a burning cigarette. Once in a while, he’d turn his pudgy body and run his eyes over the audience.
I wondered if he had ever noticed me, with my short frame and massive glasses. But maybe it would be better if he didn’t. After all, what could he—a man who idled away his time, paid no attention to his wife, and was sleeping with the daughter of the club owner—bring me except blue ruin and tears?
But then one night he followed me home from the club. I wasn’t surprised when he came into my room, and I did nothing to stop him. He started to strip my clothes off before my fingers could touch the linen string to turn on the light. He pinned me down on the bed. My body stiffened as soon as he entered me. As he moved his hips, the bed and the four bamboo posts holding the mosquito net wobbled. He was too big for me, and his thrusts were too forceful. I felt like there was a baseball bat inside me. I clenched my fists and hissed through my teeth, wishing every pounding were the last.
“You’re like a dead fish,” he mumbled to me, frowning.
I forced a sorry smile. He wasn’t happy with me, and I didn’t want to spoil his mood. I was glad to have someone who wanted to be with me.
The bamboo creaked and he moaned loudly. Ms. Wang, the eccentric teacher who lived on the other side of the brick wall, must have heard, I thought, panicking. Tomorrow the entire town would know that I had slept with a hooligan. I would be a broken shoe forever. Finally the bed came to a standstill. The night regained its tranquility. I listened carefully, but I didn’t hear a peep from next door.
Hao collapsed next to me with his mouth open, panting. I moved over and put my head on his chest. We didn’t say anything for a while. Soon I began to sob. I started to tell him everything about me, the hamlet, my emotionless father, my loveless mother. I forgot that I barely knew this man, forgot my worries about being overheard, and wailed stridently. He covered my mouth with his hand, hushing me. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and caressed me.
Gladly I became his secret mistress, or more precisely, one of his secret mistresses. He came to see me once in a while from then on, but only after dark. When I heard someone tapping on my window in the deep of the night, I would leave the bed and open the front door for him.
I tried my best to be a good mistress to him. I never asked about his whereabouts. When he visited, I lay mute in the darkness and endured the painful rituals and his complaints. I didn’t mind, as long as I could sleep in his arms for the rest of the night. In the club, we pretended to be strangers. At the ends of many nights, I saw him zoom away with other girls on his motorcycle, girls who all had figures more slender and skin whiter than mine. I would walk home alone those nights, upset, but I always ordered myself to cool down and be happy that I was lucky enough just to be one of his concubines. I wasn’t really sure why I was attracted to him. Maybe it was his haughty-yet-noble manner, or the way he sang like Leslie Chueng, or perhaps it was just that he was the only one in that deathly still town who was willing to listen to me.
I spent the time when Hao wasn’t around condemning myself for my affair with him. Between this and his secret visits, a few months went by in no time. Then, one day while I was grading homework in the office, Small Uncle called and told me that Spring was in the emergency room of Suzhou No. 4 Hospital, more dead than alive.
“She rode a motorcycle into a tree.” Small Uncle’s voice was unusually slow. My mother, he told me, was north of the Yangtze River, on a vacation with Honor, but she had been contacted and was rushing back.
When I reached the hospital, it was completely dark. I found my way to the patient unit. As soon as the ominous smell of sodium carbonate pervading the hallway came to my nose, my muscles tightened as I remembered my own hospital visit, which suddenly didn’t seem so long ago. I stopped and took a deep breath.
I burst into sickroom number 3. I quickly glanced at each of the heads lying on the dirty pillows, searching for my sister’s familiar face. I didn’t see her. After thoroughly searching the other three sickrooms on the same floor, I still couldn’t find her. I ran back and forth down the dimly lit hallway several times, not knowing what to do. I felt like I was losing my mind, engulfed by the clamor of the busy nurses and the sick, sobbing patients.
Finally, in the corner of sickroom number 3 farthest away from the door, I spotted my father’s bent back in his old navy blue jacket. I ran toward him. On the bed he was standing next to, I saw my sister’s head, swollen and covered with wounds, almost entirely unrecognizable. I put my hand over my mouth. For a minute I stood there gasping at her distorted features, and then I started crying.
As I’ve said, I had never liked my sister when we were growing up. She was the little witch sent to torture me. I cursed her thousands of times as a child, this evil being who had taken everything away from me. But now, at the sight of her swollen, damaged face, I felt for her as I never had before.
I fell to my knees and clutched the edge of the bed. I saw her matted hair sticking to the blood on her face. She groaned but didn’t wake up.
Covered with charcoal dust, my father stood in the corner, mopping tears from the corners of his eyes with the bottom of his jacket. I couldn’t believe it. My father was crying. The zombie father who had barely talked to us for ten years was actually crying.
He did have feelings after all. I don’t hate you any more, Dad, I thought, no matter what you did before.
“Dad,” I called him gently, with tears in my eyes.
“That son of a bitch. I’m going to kill him.” He choked and couldn’t continue.
So there was a man involved. I wanted to ask him who it was, but I couldn’t speak either.
Soon it was midnight, and the hospital became quiet except for the sound of snores as patients fell asleep. My father and I sat on the floor in the dark, fully awake and alert. We knew the real storm was yet to come, as my mother would soon arrive on the overnight express train from the north. We didn’t exchange a word, longing for and yet dreading the pounding of those familiar footsteps down the hall.
Finally the door swung open. My mother entered with a travel-worn face and wide-open, panicky eyes. She spotted us and then flew to the bed like an arrow. In the moonlight shining through the windows, she looked at Spring’s face and immediately clamped her palm over her open mouth. She pivoted around and dashed back into the hall. I followed. In the corridor’s pale yellow light, I saw her throwing her head back and banging it hard against the wall, trying to muffle her crying by covering her mouth. But then she gave up and let out her hoarse wails.
“Why? Why did this happen? Why did I leave her alone at home?”
The doors of the sick rooms swung open and people stuck their curious heads out to watch. My mother was shaking and crying out as if she were the one who had almost killed my sister. I wanted to step forward, put my arms around her, and cry with her, but I stayed where I was. The enormous sorrow she was feeling echoed mine, but I was also full of anger, thinking about where she had been while her daughter was nearly dying.
My father appeared quietly in the hallway with red eyes. At the sight of him, my mother started throwing out accusations. “Why did you let her out, you son of a bitch? Why didn’t you keep an eye on her?”
“How could I know what she was doing? What kind of irresponsible mother are you? That son of a bitch sweet-talked her into riding the motorcycle at night,” my father swore angrily.
“That son of a bitch! O Buddha, why did this happen? That fool is married and has a kid. She’s only seventeen. How is she going to face the future, now that everyone knows she is a pair of broken shoes?”
They were biting at each other like two dogs again. I turned around and went back to Spring’s bed. I just wanted my sister to come back to life.
To everyone’s relief, two days later Spring, who at one point had been pronounced dead, twitched her puffy fingers and slowly opened her swollen eyelids.
“Don’t blame Jian. He’s not a bad guy,” she murmured immediately to my mother.
“You knucklehead. Is this the only thing on your mind, after a near brush with death?” My mother pointed her finger at Spring and reprimanded her loudly. “Don’t blame him? You idiot. He walked away with a few scratches, and so far even his soul hasn’t showed up at your bed. Who is going to pay for the hospital bill? How are you going to find a husband in the future?” Her scolding slowly turned into choked whines.
Spring lay in her bed and listened to my mother’s grieving quietly. Her silence absorbed all the noise and cries in the room like a sponge. You could hardly tell she was breathing.
“I don’t care if his father is a tycoon or what. I’ll settle accounts with him even if I have to crawl on my knees to the Villages Committee,” my mother declared.
I stepped back into the corner and hid my face, dreading what was to come. I realized that Spring’s accident was just the first shot of a bloody war.
Spring stayed in the hospital for almost eighty days, each one filled with my mother’s tears, swearing, and scolding. Soon after my sister limped out of the hospital gate with the help of a cane into the summer’s fierce heat, my mother’s long battle of appeals and sobs to the cadres in the Villages Committee began. She often stopped a cadre on the road and pleaded with him to help. She cried and begged them to talk to Jian’s father, who owned a factory, and to persuade him to offer us some financial compensation. The cadres always turned a deaf ear to her, since she was just an ant who dreamed of shaking a big tree.
Afterward, she would come home and sit in the cement front yard, scrubbing dirty clothes and crying and berating Spring for being such a disgrace and bringing so much shame to the family. The crying and moaning dragged on deep into the fall. One day, when the leaves were almost all on the ground, my mother finally came home with a thin stack of yuan in her hand.
It wasn’t just the money; it was the principle, she said. But for this thin stack of bills, she had shed so many tears, knelt down to the cadres so many times, and endured countless insults and so much ridicule. Life was so unfair to us because we were poor, lowly, and powerless. There was no such thing as justice.
Spring’s body was still swollen like a balloon, and her face was so puffy that her eyes were almost hidden. I hoped that the memory of the pain and numbness in her limbs was carved into her bones and would stop her from doing anything foolish again.
Bad things always come in pairs. The secret relationship between Hao and me was finally brought to the surface by Ms. Xu, who was in charge of every aspect of the lives of the female teachers at the school. There is not a wall in the world that air doesn’t leak through, people say. Apparently my activities were now fodder for gossip.
On a hot day in the summer, she stopped my bike as I was on my way home. She chatted with me, smiling, as we walked together, and I nodded to her occasionally.
Out of the blue, Ms. Xu said, “Little Shen, I heard a rumor that you are very close to a scoundrel in the town called Hao. Of course, I said this couldn’t be true, right?” She looked at my eyes, trying to sound me out. “You are a young, prosperous teacher. He’s married and a good-for-nothing. It’s not possible that you two could be together.”
I looked at her unflinchingly and laughed. “God, why do people make these things up? I’ve only met him a couple of times at the club.”
She kept looking at me expectantly. I raised my head and continued, trying to sound as sincere as possible: “How could that be possible? What am I, stupid? Wreck my future for such a rascal?”
Her over-powdered cheeks relaxed. “Good, good, Little Shen. I know you’re a good girl and wouldn’t make any political mistakes. Of course you know how important your reputation is for your future.”
Hao came that night, and I told him about my encounter with Ms. Xu. He listened quietly, taking a drag from his cigarette occasionally. While exhaling the smoke through his full lips, he said cheerfully, “No worries. I’m leaving for Shanghai soon anyway. My father is building a new factory there, and I am going to be the manager.”
“Oh, really?” I squeezed out a smile. “Congratulations!” I added flatly.
He doesn’t appear at all sad about leaving me, I thought bitterly. But then, what was I? I was just one of his mistresses. I should have expected this the minute he barged into my life. By now I should be used to men coming and going, I told myself, and I put on my happy face.
I didn’t see him again until the end of August, when he and a group of friends came to the town’s newly opened pub, where I was working as a cashier during the summer. I sat behind the cash register in the dusky light and stealthily watched the box with tall chairs and chiffon curtains where Hao was holding a girl in his arms and enjoying himself with his friends. My mood was as dark as the corner where I hid myself.
Just that day, Principal Chen had warned me: “I heard you are working at the pub. They don’t need you to collect money. Good people in the town never go there; only hoodlums hang around there. You are a teacher, a model to our future generations. You should pay more attention to the impression you make in public.”
I knew that he was right. Just half an hour earlier, a hoodlum had caught me and grabbed my chest. I didn’t know why I wanted to work in the pub, why I wanted to be close to hoodlums, why I wanted to be bad and why in the end I couldn’t be truly bad—truly bad people didn’t lash their consciences every minute of the day, as I did.
Hao was saying good-bye to his friends and promising to call them from Shanghai. He passed my cashier desk next to the door without stopping, without giving me a look or saying good-bye. He disappeared out the door.
Just like that, another man had gone in and out of my life as carelessly and breezily as an airborne feather. I was alone again.
As if a box of bees had been set free in my chest, I fluttered around the pub for the rest of the night. My shift finally ended. I walked out of the pub feeling restless. Frogs were singing gleefully in the rice paddies that lined the road.
I spotted Gold Hill, one of Hao’s best friends, sitting on his motorcycle smoking a cigarette. Hot-headed yet loyal, he was one of the town’s top hoodlums. He was very different from Hao. While Hao was stocky, reticent, and mysterious, Gold Hill was athletic, dauntless, and always on a rampage. I walked up to him and asked him whether he could talk to me. He looked at me with knowing eyes and smiled. Then he threw his cigarette away, pointed at the rear seat of his motorcycle, and told me to hop on. I saw his four-fingered hand, and for a second I hesitated. I knew how he had lost his index finger. It had been lopped off by a kitchen knife during a gang fight. But I got on the motorcycle anyway. It would cool my burning heart down just to talk to him about Hao, I told myself.
The moist but dusty summer breeze blew into my face as the motorcycle streaked down the small countryside roads. The night was so serene, the wind was so free, and finally the tears I had been holding in were flowing down my cheeks. I had feelings for Hao, I realized. I had thought I didn’t care any more, but I was wrong.
We stopped at a small cliff next to a rice paddy. I quickly got off and ran toward the stream under the cliff. I went into it, shuddering in the water and letting myself sink down into it, trying to extinguish the fire in my heart, not caring that I had never learned how to swim.
Gold Hill climbed down the cliff to the riverbank. He reached his hand out to me.
“I want to swim. Let me swim.” I smiled sweetly at him and stepped away from his hand further into the water.
He shook his head and then sat down on the ground. He crossed his legs, shrugged, and said to me, “Why are you doing this? You know Hao doesn’t care.”
His words hurt. I sank myself deeper into the chilly water. “Hey, you want to see me topless?” I asked half-jokingly.
“What are you doing?” he said with a baffled smile as he watched me taking off my clothes.
Though I hadn’t had a sip of alcohol that night, I felt as if I was drunk. Gold Hill waded into the water, pulled me out, and led me up the slope. I followed him like a lost child, and then, at the top of the cliff, I collapsed onto the muddy ground. I wrapped my arms around my knees and sat beneath the stars, shivering and crying.
Gold Hill sat next to me, held me in his arms, and started to kiss me. I sobbed dizzily while he caressed my body, this man who was more a hoodlum than Hao.
I took him to my room that night. We lay inside the mosquito net on my hard wooden bed, side by side. The usually talkative Gold Hill was quiet. Eventually, without saying a word, he rolled over and started to undress me. Surprisingly, despite his appearance, he was gentle and tender when he caressed me. Then he slowly entered me, and the physical pleasure brought by his movement gradually eased my pain. Afterward, I put my head on his chest, like I used to do with Hao, and closed my eyes. I didn’t tell Gold Hill anything about my family. He was nobody, I told myself, just someone I had grabbed hastily to fill in the spot left empty by Hao. At this point, I didn’t even care what kind of man I was with. I just wanted someone to hold on to.
Life continued as before, with only one difference—now it was Gold Hill, not Hao, who tapped on my window.