WHEN WE RETURNED to Guangzhou, I found that the halo around Brother Yong’s head had vanished, and I was no longer intoxicated by his presence. I told myself to look at him strictly as my superior. After all, except at Amway meetings and seminars when everyone shared equally in the Amway dream, Brother Yong and I lived in two different worlds. After the gatherings, he got on his Harley and roared away to his apartment in downtown Guangzhou while I walked through the alleys, stepped over the puddles and the cabbage leaves, opened the rusty iron gate to the hallway, climbed the urinestinking stairs to the seventh floor, and fell onto my bed in my slum home.
As the days went by, my mind came to have just one focus—Amway. Forget men; forget love; and forget the idea of a home, I told myself. In this turbulent world, I had to stand on my own two feet, and nobody could build a future for me except myself. Men were untrustworthy, and I didn’t need them to make me feel safe, to make me not worry, because I could do that on my own.
I threw myself into Amway and worked as if there was no tomorrow. It had completely taken over my mind and soul. I examined the carpets wherever I went and would frequently take out Amway detergent and demonstrate to everyone in the office how efficiently it removed stains and gum, ignoring the rolled eyes and mocking laughter. On the street, I would observe every person walking by me, then approach the street cleaner in her mask and ask if she wanted to do something better in life, though I knew that in the end she would probably brandish her broom and threaten to scream if I didn’t leave her alone. In the hotels where I stayed for Amway seminars, I would knock on the next room’s door; persuade the guests, who were busy playing mah-jongg, to take a look at my brochure; and eagerly tell them how the boss of a major bank had joined us. I wouldn’t give up until I was pushed out of the room and the door was banged in my face. Then I would stand in the corridor, stare at the door for a long while, and finally tell myself to gather up my strength and move my feet because there were many people out there who were unaware of Amway and many people who were successful because of Amway.
Whenever I felt like I was at the end of my rope, when I despaired so much that I couldn’t get myself out of the bed in the morning, I would go to Amway seminars to recharge. After rounds of inspiring speeches, I would be back to feeling ready to conquer the world.
In May 1997, I left the communal Amway apartment and lived a life of homelessness for weeks, following Sister Grace on a multi-city seminar tour. I usually couldn’t afford a seat on the extremely crowded trains, so I would sleep on layers of newspaper on the floor under the seats at night as I rode between cities along the east coast. Daytime always went by quickly in seminars where thousands of Amway fanatics spoke and sang. When night fell, if I wasn’t getting on a train, I would squeeze into any bed offered to me, usually with five or six Amway sisters. When I wasn’t so lucky, I would spend the night curled up in a corner at the local train station.
My belief in Amway never wavered. Even when I hadn’t eaten for the entire day, even when I was exhausted and collapsed on the street, I never questioned the philosophy of the Amway career. It was not Amway’s fault; it was mine, I told myself every time I had doubts. It was because I didn’t work hard enough or wasn’t competent enough that I didn’t succeed.
In June, I returned to hot and rainy Guangzhou. New transients occupied the apartment in the alley, but there was always space for one more. I moved back in. It was moldy and humid and felt like an oven. The bathroom reeked of mildew and looked so disgusting that I couldn’t even bring myself to set foot in it. The air in the apartment felt rotten. On the days I wasn’t out on the street doing Amway, I stayed in the only livable place—the bed. I would cover my head with the quilt and sleep like a log while the other Amway fanatics debated hotly with a Pacific Insurance salesman who had just moved into the apartment about which career was better and chalk made squeaking sounds on the tiny blackboard in the living room.
I didn’t have much money left, and my strength was gone. I wasn’t able to sell many Amway products and couldn’t develop any more subordinates. There was a time when I had regularly called my two subordinates, Wu and Fish, my former classmates, and pretended to be optimistic, shouting that they should keep trying because they would be successful soon, but now I had no energy left even to lift the phone when someone called me. Phone calls used to get me so excited, because it could be someone interested in Amway who would become my next subordinate.
Even worse, I had lice all over my body. I wondered if everybody in the apartment had them, but I didn’t even feel like investigating. I sat on the bed and madly scratched my skin with both hands until blood oozed out of the bites, but still the itch didn’t stop. I fell back down on the bed, wrapped the quilt around myself tightly, and retreated into my cocoon. But the itching didn’t stop, so I kept scratching, and seeing bloody spots constantly being added to my body, I eventually panicked: it struck me forcefully and clearly that I needed to get rid of the lice.
So one day when all the brothers and sisters were loudly singing the ‘Song of Success’ at a seminar, I let go of their hands and left. I didn’t feel much. I crossed the lobby like a walking corpse and went out of the hotel door, past the fountain in the yard, and onto the sidewalk leading away from the hotel.
My hand reached into my pocket and took out the Bank of China checkbook Brother Yong had given me the day I joined Amway. I remembered how excited I’d been that the password Brother Yong had chosen for me was the same as my regular password. I had kept mentioning this to him until one day he impatiently told me that it was just a password. I had once ardently believed that Amway would be wiring lots of money to this account, but now in the wire column, the only number I saw was RMB310, and the account balance was 0. After all my effort and pain, I’d made only 310 yuan from my Amway career. Now not only was I penniless, I also had lice crawling all over my body.
You need to stop this, I thought. You need to cure the lice. You need to go home. I recalled the house in the Shen Hamlet. I tried to picture my mother and father, but after the rollercoaster of life in the South, their faces seemed strangely hazy. I longed for a home like never before, and the Shen Hamlet suddenly appeared to be more of a home than anywhere in the South.
Brother Yong was displeased when I asked if he would lend me some money for a train ticket home. I knew borrowing money was taboo among Amway brothers and sisters. “I promise I’ll pay you back very soon,” I assured him. “I’m going to my home town to build a new Amway career there. I promise you I will have a network there soon.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said unenthusiastically.
Feeling uncomfortable and hurt by his reaction, I decided not to bother him any further. Though I was poor, I still had my dignity. So the next day I made a quick trip to Long Jiang and borrowed some money from Huang. I left town right away, before he had a chance to persuade me stay in the South.
Before I boarded the train, I called Brother Yong and told him that there was no need for him to lend me money and that he should wait for good news from me.
So, in July 1997, I returned to the Shen Hamlet all covered with lice. As I walked along the ditch between the blossoming safflower fields, I wondered if I was in a dream, if I was a ghost drifting in this world of golden yellow flowers. The familiar smell of the soil, the sweet smell of the safflowers, and the humming of the bees brought tears to my eyes. It had been barely a year since I had last left the hamlet, but it felt like much, much longer.
The door to the central room of my parents’ house was ajar. The sound of silkworms nibbling mulberry leaves came to my ears, a sound that had accompanied my entire childhood. Oh, home! I stood on the threshold observing the room. A layer of white silkworms wiggled on the dark green mulberry bush leaves that rested on top of straw beds spread on the floor. In the space between the beds, I saw my mother squatting on her heels, her back to me and her dark green scarf wrapped around her head. She was taking leaves out of the bamboo basket next to her feet.
“Mama,” I said.
She turned. I couldn’t believe what I saw. My mother, whose pretty, well-proportioned face used to make me feel secretly proud and jealous, looked like a different woman. Her face was twisted and pulled to the left; her lips were slanted; and her cheeks were swollen like two loafs of bread.
She just looked at me and turned back to her chore. I felt like I’d been stabbed with a needle. Her eyes, jammed in their swollen sockets, had been cold, as if she was looking at her worst enemy.
I stood where I was for a good while, shocked at what I had seen and hurt by my mother’s reaction to my return. Then I went into the kitchen. I poured myself a big bucket of water and grabbed a towel.
In the dark storage room to the side of the house, with the blue plastic curtains drawn as usual, I sat in the big plastic tub, soaked the towel with clean water, and slowly rubbed myself. I saw the rotten spots from the lice on my body, the dirt under my long fingernails, and my ugly feet, swollen from the days of walking. My face was wet, but I couldn’t tell whether it was water or tears.
Guilt attacked me. I had been such a bad daughter. I hadn’t been here when my mother’s face got damaged. I had been thousands of miles away, trying to forget her. I hated myself. I had only written once and had pretended to myself that my family was dead. And what had I done while I was in the South? What had I achieved?
When my father came home that night, he didn’t say anything to me, as usual. When Spring discovered my presence, she responded with neither surprise nor happiness. “Oh, you’re back,” she said as she parked her bike in the front yard, and then she went straight upstairs to her room. I felt like a piece of furniture.
Like everyone else in the house, I stayed quiet. I ate and slept and spent the rest of my time helping my mother with the housework. For the first time in my life, I tried to be a good daughter to her.
A week later, after rubbing my body with soap and water every day, the lice were finally gone, and my mother started to talk to me. The swelling was leaving her face little by little, and when she was in a good mood—still rare—she explained that she’d had a stroke of apoplexy.
“Why?”
She puckered her still-slanted lips. “You know. Just life. Nobody listens to me. Nothing is ever good.”
“Did you go and see a doctor?”
“I went there once, alone. Who cares about me in this family, anyway?”
I wished I knew how to comfort her. Until then, I’d never realized the effect of my behavior on my mother, how truly devastated she had been when I’d quit the teaching job and gone to the South. Spring wasn’t the ideal daughter either. She’d rented a store in town and was barely scraping by selling clothes. Plus, she was hanging out with some bad guys, according to my mother. My father, who was busy working in the rice fields, still wouldn’t talk much to my mother. What a poor woman she was and what a lonely life she led.
For two weeks I stayed at home, trying my best to help my ailing mother. At night I tossed and turned until daybreak, analyzing my failure with Amway. When the swellings and twists on my mother’s face were almost gone, I took out my Amway bag, got on a bike, and rode toward the surrounding villages. One of the many principles Amway had taught me was that you could do Amway anywhere, because Amway was good for everyone. After my merciless failure in Guangzhou, I decided to conquer the countryside.
It was close to the height of the summer. With the scorching sun above my head, I zigzagged over the dirt paths in the neighboring villages and visited a few of my high school classmates. I had high hopes. People in the countryside needed great opportunities like Amway more than the people living the city.
“This is what you are doing now? Selling American detergent? What happened? You were the only one in our class who went to college,” one former classmate said, throwing the brochure back at me.
I was undaunted by this negative reaction. After all, I’d experienced worse in Guangzhou. The second day, I biked for an hour to visit another classmate, who shook his head and said that he was too busy for this kind of childish thing.
I kept shuttling back and forth between villages and was turned down by everyone. One classmate smiled modestly, saying he was too stupid to undertake such a complicated career. Another one told me sincerely that this Amway thing was just not good for the countryside folk. I wouldn’t give up. I kept hopping on my bike every day, until I was thrown out by the mother of Peony, my old school friend. “You’re a college graduate!” she yelled. “Whatever you’re doing is not good for our Peony. She’s just a country girl. Why don’t you go somewhere else to put on your hoaxes?”
I stood in their courtyard, humiliated. It was the busy farming season, and everyone had just come back from the fields in straw hats, with sickles in their hands and cuts on their faces from the rice-shoot edges. I looked at Peony. She was dirty and dusty and busy soothing her wailing child, and I realized I was in the wrong place to preach Amway. I had forgotten that people in the countryside tended to stay where they were and never wanted much in life.
I hopped back on my bicycle. Pedaling listlessly in the high noon sun, I felt a new sense of despair. For the first time, I started to question: Did Amway really work? That day, my belief in Amway began to waver, and I considered that it might be the scam everyone said it was.
“You are completely out of your mind, going around the countryside like that,” my mother nagged. “Look at you, as dark as a black monkey. Go back to the middle school, okay? It’s not too late. I’ll go with you and beg the principal to take you back. He won’t cancel the contract you signed with the school, but I’ll beg him to give you some time to pay them back.” She coaxed and cajoled me as if I were a little girl.
I spoke to her as earnestly as I could. “Mama, I really hate teaching. Please understand. There’s no future in teaching. I’ll always be poor. Our family has always been so poor, and I don’t want to be poor any more.”
“I know teachers don’t make much money, but even teaching is such an honor for our family. All the generations of our family have been bare-footed peasants. We eat and breathe dirt every day. Finally you become a teacher, but then you throw it away,” my mother said bitterly.
I didn’t know how to make her understand that there were many opportunities out there, many different occupations, and that not teaching wasn’t the end of the world. I tried to imagine myself going back to Ba Jin, to the middle school, taking the pointer, and standing in front of the blackboard every day. The image frightened me. Though I had tried very hard to keep my teaching post open when I first left the school, now that I had seen the much bigger sky outside that town, I didn’t ever want to go back to it.
“There’s no need to talk about this any longer. I am not going back to that school,” I said with curt finality, despite my mother’s angry glare. I wished her face would heal completely soon so that I could carry on with my life, the destiny I had chosen for myself, free of worries and guilt.
I continued preaching Amway. Often next to a manure pit or in a ditch in the rice fields, I explained the Amway career to somebody with a carrying pole on his shoulder or with pants rolled up to his knees and feet soaked in mud. Knowing how ridiculous I looked in people’s eyes, I had to tell myself to forget my self-consciousness and concentrate on the extraordinary opportunities Amway was offering.
Yet a rock never blossoms, no matter how often you water it. By the end of July, I had given up all hope of succeeding with Amway. Sadly but calmly, I accepted the fact that, despite all the blood and tears, I had failed completely. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t blame myself for this failure, because I knew I had tried my very best to make it work. The fact that it didn’t must have been Amway’s fault, not mine.
I put away all my Amway products and tore all the Amway posters off my wall. I took a deep breath and told myself, I am free of Amway. A huge weight was off my back. I could see through Amway and Brother Yong now. He was just a clown, good at manipulating people, and Amway was just a scheme played on thousands of Chinese who had ambitions but few opportunities to succeed.
The day after I quit Amway, I called Huang.
“Come back here, you silly girl. What are you doing in the countryside?” he shouted at me over the phone. “I just heard that a knitting company here is looking for an English translator. A good friend of mine knows the boss. You can go work there. They pay eighteen hundred yuan a month.”
Eighteen hundred yuan a month, more than I had made in LongJiang as Director Yip’s secretary!
I hung up the phone and went out to the asphalt road in front of the house for a walk. As I listened to the honking of the boats on the canal, I felt the high aspirations I’d had a year ago growing in my mind again. I had thought that I had been completely defeated, but as it turned out, the ambition was still there. I hadn’t had enough sufferings in the South yet. Now after the weeks at home eating well and returning to health, I was reinvigorated, ready to go again.
The night before my departure, I packed two bags, left them downstairs, and then went upstairs to inform my mother of my decision to return to the South. She sat on the bed in her room and couldn’t do or say anything except sob. Honor was sitting next to her, sighing. His face was yellower and skinnier. I had heard that his business was not doing well and he was now short of money himself. I prayed that he would continue to take care of my mother as he had done for the past ten years.
At my mother’s temples I saw streaks of gray. She was growing old. Time had erased the hatred I had had for her. I didn’t know when I had decided to forget the way she had treated me as a child, but at that moment I only wished she could get some love and care in her life, which had been so full of misery.
The next morning, I came downstairs feeling refreshed but a little reluctant to part from home. My mother was on the stool behind the stove, weeping just as she had when I had left the house a year earlier. I hardened my heart and turned to fetch my bags, but when I entered the side room I saw only one bag lying on the cement ground. The big bag with all the vital items such as clothes, shoes, toothbrush, and comb was missing.
I ran back to the kitchen. “Where’s my other bag?”
“I don’t know. Go ask your father,” my mother replied.
I looked at her suspiciously. My father had been as cold as ice to me ever since I had come back. I didn’t think he would bother to hide my bag.
I searched everywhere in the house, flustered and dismayed, but couldn’t find it. “Where is he?” I said, returning to the kitchen, really annoyed.
“He’s gone to the fields.” She stared at the fire in the stove.
Fuming with anger, I stamped the floor with my foot, grabbed the small bag, and ran out of the house. Nothing would stop me. I would have to do without my other bag.
On the way to Shanghai, I visited Wu’s town. Though the guilt of dragging her into joining Amway tormented me, I faced her and admitted that I had given it up and assured her that soon I would compensate her for the money she had lost, no matter what. Her face relaxed, and she took out the two thousand yuan I’d asked to borrow for my plane ticket. I promised her earnestly that I would soon pay her back.
She was the only person I could think of to ask for help. The idea of asking my parents never even occurred to me. Borrowing money from my parents and admitting my financial failure to them was the last thing I wanted to do.
Later that day, I boarded a plane from Shanghai to Guangzhou. Sitting on the plane, I felt a sense of déjà vu. It was July again, the same month I had flown to the South a year earlier. I had many new scars, and I was even poorer than I had been then, indebted to almost everyone I knew. But this time it was going to be different, I promised myself solemnly. This time I was going to find my piece of sky.