SOON IT WAS April. The willow trees around the lake started to blossom, and people swarmed to the teahouses at the beaches, spending their days sitting lazily in the sun and sipping tea.
It had only been two months since Xiao Yi had been fired, but my life seemed to be completely different already. Work took only a few hours every day, and I was left with tons of time to kill on my own. Finally I had money, but I was extremely lonely.
In the afternoons I often sat in the parterre in the open yard in front of the new building, staring at the sidewalk and the street and getting lost in a trance. The sound of a lifeless recorded female voice announcing the names of the bus stations mingled with the loud chirping of birds and crickets in the flowering shrubs behind me. I remembered someone once telling me proudly that every bus in Xiamen ran on vegetable oil, and that was why Xiamen had been voted the cleanest city in China. So what? I thought to myself. The sense of novelty
I had felt when I first arrived in Xiamen, the pride of being somewhere so gorgeous and exotic, was long gone. Everything in my world seemed to have lost its original bright color. I was back to being a lonely, miserable creature who had a lot of inexplicable wrath inside.
A spatter of giggling interrupted my thoughts. I saw a group of young girls in tube tops and high heels brushing past me on the sidewalk. Their faces were as fresh as peaches, and their laughter was as carefree as spring itself. I frowned enviously and reached for my purse. I took out a cigarette and lit it.
Jennifer, my new friend, had just taught me how to smoke.
“A long, thin cigarette dangling between your fingers with red nails—what could be sexier and cooler than this? Every man likes bad girls who can smoke,” she’d said.
I had gazed at her in the dim light of the bar she had taken me to, at her face painted with Shisheido powder and L’Oréal eye shadow, and hesitated for just a second. Nicotine’s danger came to mind, but then I dismissed the thought. I should just be happy that a trendy girl like her was willing to hang out with me, I told myself.
Jennifer and I had met one afternoon when I was especially bored with wandering the streets. I had gone into a spa, thinking that now that I had money, I should fix my rough peasant skin, which Ah Mei had once compared to a chicken’s. Just as I was standing over a giant bathtub and exclaiming at amount of the milk the girl had poured in—the kind of milk from real cows that was very hard to get in the hamlet—and vacillating about whether to get completely naked, Jennifer walked over in a lace bra and panties. She chastised the girl for cheating customers by putting in only three kilograms of milk instead of four as the price table stated. I gave her a thankful look, and we exchanged cell phone numbers and became friends.
Sitting in front of my building, I puffed out a streak of smoke and looked at my bare fingernails. I really needed to get a manicure and go to the newly opened Le Printemps department store to get more clothes. Otherwise, I would never be able to keep up with Jennifer, although I doubted that I would ever be as stylish as she was. She knew all the cool restaurants and bars in the city, especially places where foreigners hung out, and where to find the best steaks and desserts.
Jennifer had opened up a new part of city life to me, a life intimate with Western culture. The previous night, she had taken me to the Oriental Bar next to the best hotel in the city, the Marco Polo. Almost all the customers were Westerners and Chinese girls eager to hang out with Westerners. She’d introduced me to Corona, Heineken, Budweiser, and her American boyfriend.
“This is Danny,” she had said, pointing to the round guy sitting next to her with his arm around her shoulder. I’d looked at him curiously. Short and in his forties with a moustache, he looked a lot like the plastic statue of the Colonel that stood outside every KFC. The only difference was that he was wearing shorts and sneakers, with a pair of white socks pulled all the way up to his knees. If he had changed into pants and leather shoes and had been given a cane, he would have fooled every KFC-crazy Chinese kid in the city. At the thought, I’d had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing.
The sun was going down already. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly five o’clock. I had gotten myself out of my bed just two hours earlier, yet I was already feeling exhausted. I took out my cell phone.
“Hey, Jennifer, it’s me.”
“Hey, Caroline, meet you at KK around nine?”
“Sounds good. Shoot some pool after KK is closed?”
“Of course.”
Jennifer had turned me into a night animal who wouldn’t go to bed before dawn. KK, the most popular disco club in the city, closed at four in the morning, but Jennifer and I lingered in all sorts of dim-sum places and pool clubs every night until the taxi drivers changed shifts at six, and the new drivers picked us up as their first passengers of the day.
I walked back to the apartment. Old Two was busy in the kitchen with dinner. In the living room, the computer’s screen saver flashed Caroline, and I saw a few pieces of paper lying on the fax machine next to it. I sighed and grabbed them. Damn Europeans! Couldn’t they start their days a little earlier than three p.m. my time? I sat down at the desk listlessly and started my daily few hours—or minutes—of work. After faxing back and forth for a little while, I signed a deal for $100,000 worth of KOKETT machines with a German company before Old Two called me for dinner.
In my bedroom, I unlocked the top drawer of my desk and took out my bank account booklet. Seeing all the wire transfers from overseas in Euros or dollars, made at different times and in different amounts, I felt my heart beating a little faster. I found it hard to convince myself that I was becoming a wealthy woman. It felt strange and surreal, like I had climbed to the top of a skyscraper and was now looking down at the street, feeling dizzy and perplexed.
At nine o’clock, my taxi pulled under the tall metal arch of the KK disco club, where crowds gathered, waiting for a chance to sneak in. The fifty-yuan entrance fee was a lot for most people. The air was filled with the familiar smells of grilled lamb skewers from the barbecue stands on the sidewalks and heavy cologne and deodorant from the foreigners, who didn’t blink at throwing multiple fifty-yuan bills to the girl at the admission window.
I walked quickly toward the entrance, made of heavy metal and shaped like a giant tube leading to the club. As usual, several kids holding wilting flowers in their hands besieged me. Pulling my sleeves for all they were worth, they cried, “Sister, sister, buy some flowers from me!”
I kept walking. They followed me, tugging on my clothes with their dirty hands. At last I lost my patience and shouted, “I don’t want to buy flowers. Let me go!”
“Sister, please buy a flower from me,” one of the girls begged. “It’ll only cost you five yuan. I haven’t sold any today. My mother will be mad.”
I paused and dropped my eyes to her little dirty face. “Stop selling flowers on the street. Go back to school.”
“We don’t have money for school,” she answered right away. “We moved here from the countryside. Buy some flowers, buy some flowers!”
I looked at her and didn’t know what to say. I wanted to reach for my purse and give her some money, yet a voice inside warned me: don’t help these parents who use their kids to make money. As I was struggling with my conscience, one of the kids screamed to the others, “There’s a foreigner over there. Let’s go!” All of a sudden they let go of my clothes and dashed to a big-bellied American guy in a Dell T-shirt standing a few feet away from me.
I entered the club in an inexplicably gloomy mood. I spotted Jennifer’s pale, delicate face right away. She was sitting on a leather couch in a corner, on the other side of the bar that occupied the middle of the room. I walked over and sat down. I said hi to Danny when he looked up from touching and squeezing Jennifer all over for a moment.
Sitting quietly and sipping beer, I watched the couple flirting. Holding Jennifer’s leg up by her ankle, Danny ran his hand all over her skin and then bent down and kissed her ankle bracelet, which was made of tiny bells. Seeing him drooling all over her, I turned my head away. Jennifer was so pretty. Why was she sleeping with Danny, a man with a wife and three kids back in Cleveland? Working for Dell as a software engineer, Danny could live like a king in China. To Jennifer, he was probably just a sugar daddy. I wondered how much money he gave Jennifer every month. Five thousand, ten thousand yuan?
In the twinkling light of the club, I couldn’t tell exactly what I was feeling—envy for her for sleeping with rich foreigners for money or loathing for her for sleeping with rich foreigners for money. Perhaps money wasn’t the only thing Jennifer was getting. There was also jealousy from other girls and the prestige of hanging out with rich foreigners.
The DJ turned up the music, and suddenly the whole floor was shaking with the strong beats. The sound of Coco Lee singing “Di Do Di” blared from the giant speakers that seemed to be everywhere in the club. I grabbed the Corona bottle on the table and gulped down the awful beer, which cost ten times more at the club than it would have at a convenience store, and felt increasingly fretful in this drunk and dreamy world. There was a strong desire inside me. I realized that I hadn’t been with a man since I had left the South. Now I felt as if a hand were reaching out from my body and trying to grab men on its own.
A tall man leaned against the big metal column at the bar, watching the dancing crowd quietly. His long nose, blond hair, and athletic figure caught my eye. A few minutes later, Jennifer introduced him to me.
“This is Hafs, from Finland. He works for Nokia. You know they have a big factory here, right?” She seemed to know every foreigner in the city.
I stared up at him admiringly. He looked like the model in the Calvin Klein ad in a Western magazine that Jennifer had shown me.
“You are the most handsome man I have ever seen,” I said sincerely. I didn’t know how to be subtle. His eyes looked as cold as icebergs, but his haughty demeanor triggered something in me.
“Thank you.” He smiled politely.
We quietly watched the go-go girls in tall boots dancing on the bar. He kept drinking and rarely spoke. All I learned about him was that he had a wife and two kids in Finland.
When it was almost four o’clock in the morning, the music started to become sluggish, as did the crowd. Hafs stooped and grabbed his coat from the leather couch, and then with a faint smile he said, “Time to go.”
I watched his tall, broad back moving away from me in the crowd, and suddenly I felt a little lost. But after a few short steps, he paused, turned around, and asked, “Would you like to come with me?”
I hesitated only for a few seconds and then I followed him out of the club, into a taxi, and then to one of the most luxurious condos in the city. The view of the lake was supposed to be fantastic from this building, but I didn’t get the chance to see it. Without wasting any words, Hafs led me directly to his bedroom.
He laid me down on his bed and slowly took off my clothes. In the dark he kissed my lips, then my chest, and then gently moved his lips all the way down. When he pressed them on my bare skin, I suddenly couldn’t breathe. It was such a wonderful feeling, his lips kissing the most private spot on my body, a new feeling that I had never experienced before.
Hafs took a condom from his pants pocket and then, after putting it on, he slowly entered me. My body jerked with sudden pleasure. He held me tightly with his muscular arms, and I felt like screaming. But almost immediately, Hafs let out a groan and hunched his back.
“Sorry, I haven’t done this in a while.” He got up on his knees. I told him not to worry.
The next morning, as soon as I woke up and saw his cold blue eyes, I said a quick good-bye and rushed out of his apartment.
That night, when I saw Hafs walking in my direction at KK, my heart almost stopped beating. I gazed at him, ready to give him a sweet smile, but he passed by without looking at me, as if he had never met me before.
I looked around the smoky club blankly, deeply puzzled and hurt. Why didn’t he even talk to me, after the previous night?
Night after night, Hafs passed me in the club as if I was a total stranger. I watched his tall figure from a distance. I saw him holding other girls’ hands and leaving the club with them. Was I not good enough for him? That must have been it. Those other girls were flowers, and I was dirt. They were tall and slender, and I was short and chubby. I tortured myself with these thoughts in KK’s deafening music.
Jennifer, who had seen enough of my eyes following Hafs all over KK, reprimanded me. “Come on, Caroline. Haven’t you heard of a one-night stand? Foreigners, they sleep around. They play with Chinese girls. They never get serious with you. Be realistic. No need to get jealous of those girls who go home with Hafs. They just want money.”
I was at a loss for words. I didn’t understand why no one was ever serious, why everyone just wanted to play. Like Steven, who had fooled me with his deep voice and loving words. Like Hafs, who had taken me home and then treated me like a stranger.
I looked at the young girls in tiny shorts and high boots flirting with foreigners all over the club. I wasn’t sure I was any better than them. Sure, I didn’t need the money. I had enough on my own. But it didn’t seem to matter. I felt empty, lost like a kite with a broken string. I drank a lot of tequila that night and went home with an Australian guy.
A few nights later I got drunk again and got into a taxi with a German guy. The only things that I remember about him are that he was tall and thin, like a man made out of paper; that he worked as an engineer for a German forklift company; and that he had a huge penis that hurt me like hell. But I didn’t care. All I wanted was to get drunk and sleep with foreigners.
I started a befuddled new life. I slept like a log in the daytime and then wandered around the city like a ghost at night. I learned not to bat an eye when paying for a Ports skirt or Chanel lipstick. I sat outside and smoked as if there were no tomorrow. The total in my bank account book kept growing, as did the number of foreigners I’d slept with, but I grew sadder every day.
I rarely refused to sleep with a Westerner. Like a sick person in need of his medicine, I longed for the moment when a foreigner asked me whether I wanted to go home with him. I was always nervous until it happened, clenching my muscles and holding my breath, as if my entire life depended on these moments and only if I got my dose could I breathe, eat, and sleep again.
I was a slut again. I cursed myself. It was bad to sleep around. But though I condemned myself, I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it and what was wrong with my head. It felt as if I was trapped in a bog, and no matter how I floundered, there was no way to get out.
“Next time I come to Xiamen, I’ll sleep with you,” John, one of our American suppliers, told me in a commanding tone, pointing his finger at me and smiling.
How old was he, sixty? He wanted to sleep with me, did he? Fine, I thought. I’ll sleep with you, but not for free. Your Japanese mistress could bear to sleep with you every night for big houses and a Mercedes-Benz. Why can’t I do the same?
The old millionaire came to Xiamen the next month, and I spent the night with him in the most luxurious suite in the Marco Polo Hotel. I was sitting on the couch, looking down at the artificial but beautiful lake. He walked up to me and gave me a Dior lipstick, some Guerlain powder, and a gold bracelet. Then I felt his cold, wet lips. His mouth moved down to my chest. I looked at this head covered with white hair and felt nothing. When he asked why my underwear didn’t match, I lied and said I didn’t have enough money to buy many pairs. In the morning, he handed me five hundred dollars and said, “This is not much, just for some underwear. Next time, I want to see them match.”
Next time? Would there be a next time? I chuckled to myself as I rode the elevator downstairs. I stopped at the Godiva counter in the lobby and bought myself some dark chocolate balls. I figured I should celebrate because I had finally pimped myself out successfully, and for a great price, five hundred dollars! I decided I should buy chocolate for myself from then on, since I didn’t think any man would buy me Godiva in this lifetime. Or roses, for that matter.
I walked out of the lobby of the Marco Polo Hotel smiling to the sun and crying inside to the devil that had taken over my soul again.
I started to read the classified page in the daily newspaper and circled the want ads for overseas jobs. The air in Xiamen was still so fresh; the sun was still so enchanting; but I couldn’t breathe freely there. I felt like all my organs were clogged up with filth. Weekly facials in beauty salons could only purify my skin, nothing more. I hung around in every club and bar in Xiamen with Jennifer, the bad girl, or with my other friend Ann, a good girl who had no idea that all the foreigners I had slept with could perhaps make up a miniUnited Nations. All the martinis and bottles of Corona that I drank couldn’t wash away the dust that had settled on me. I was backsliding. I was hypnotizing myself with alcohol and cigarettes.
Before I was completely eroded, I wanted to get myself out, out of this circle, out of Xiamen, and out of China.
One day, I read that a boat traveling between China and the Middle East was looking for wait staff. I rushed over to the office of the company. I followed the directions the captain had given me on the phone, and in a small lane I found the rundown building. I knocked on the filthy door.
In a stale conference room with a dusty navigation map on the wall, the captain told me to sit down and then handed me a piece of paper.
I held it up in the air and started to read. “‘May I help you? Would you like a drink? This way, please.’” When I finished, I saw the captain’s puzzled expression.
“Let me ask you something.” He shifted in his chair and looked at me sincerely. “Why are you applying for this job? You know that we’ll be on the sea all year around, right? And also, waitress is not the highest-level worker on the deck. It’s really hard work too, to be honest with you.”
“I know that. I don’t care. I can take it.” I shrugged.
“Your English is too good to be a waitress on our boat. You should be sitting in a fancy office building working for a foreign company making good money like all the girls out there—I mean, from your English and the way you dress.”
I looked at the captain’s aged face and gray temples and smiled wryly at him. He could tell there was something wrong with a girl with fine skin dressed in a silk suit and skirt who was willing to endure the harsh wind on the sea.
“Let me give you some honest advice. Go back to your work and enjoy life. So many girls must be jealous of you.”
I started to talk to people at all the agencies in the city that helped Chinese citizens go abroad, but every time I told them I was single, they quickly shook their heads, especially those who dealt with visas or immigration to America.
“Americans rarely let single women enter their country on non-immigrant visas,” one person told me bluntly. “They’re afraid they would never leave. They guard their borders like dogs and don’t let any inferior humans like us in. The best shortcut to get to America is to marry an American, and he’ll be your ticket to America.”
It seemed marriage might be my only bridge out of China. So I was supposed to just find a man and marry him? I wondered if it would be worth it to get married in exchange for a way out of the country.
After pondering this idea for many days, I faxed a personal letter to Carl and Jacques, our two biggest suppliers, who had become my friends, and asked them for a favor—to find a good man to marry me and take me out of China.
I was feeling desperate and suffocated, as if there was a cage around me: and this cage, in my eyes, was the entire country of China. All I could dream about was getting out of China and going to America, where it was said there was freedom and respect. There I could start my life all over again. Snakes could slough off their skin three times in a lifetime; why couldn’t I?
Jacques and Carl promised me that they would do as I’d requested and find a good husband for me. My face burned with shame as I read their faxes. What kind of woman asked everybody she knew to find a man to marry her in exchange for taking her out of China? Only a woman with no morals or sense of shame would do that.
The summer was almost gone, yet the heat was still boiling inside me. September came. Soon I would turn twenty-four, and I couldn’t sit around and wait for a man to drop from the sky to marry me any more. I was consumed by the idea of getting out of the country.
A teasing line in an ad in the evening newspaper caught my eyes: Want to go to the UAE, a country where everyone is rich and dripping with oil?
“We can easily get you out and send you to the UAE for twenty thousand yuan. You can get a job in a hotel. Many rich people go to the UAE, and you’ll meet a lot of them at the hotel. But you need a passport,” the lady at the front desk in the tiny, disordered office told me.
“How do I get a passport?” Chinese citizens were only given identification cards by the government, not passports.
“You need go back to where you come from, get approval from the unit you belong to, and then go to the local Public Security Office and apply for it. And the government will decide whether you are entitled to a passport,” she explained.
Damn it, my identification still belonged to the middle school as far as the government was concerned. This stupid system with its ridiculous rules, I thought. Now I would have to go back to the middle school and beg the headmaster for his stamp on my passport application form. I had left the school two years ago, and I didn’t belong there any more. I didn’t want to belong to anybody, to any unit or any government. I wanted to belong to myself.
No matter how mad it made me, I had no choice but to yield to the rules in order to obtain a passport. I put on my sky-blue wool suit and high heels, and, with utter loathing in my heart, I returned to the Hope Middle School, the place I had fled from two years earlier.
I took a flight to Shanghai and then a taxi directly to Ba Jin. It was a shivery fall day there. Broken bricks and moss could still be seen everywhere in the town. The sparse bamboo bushes were still swaying listlessly around the school, and the teachers, whose faces I still remembered, were still running to the classrooms at the ringing of the bell with chalk dust all over their gray or black clothes.
I sat in one of the offices while several teachers stood around smacking their lips at me. It had been only two years, yet it felt like so long, like a lifetime.
“That necklace must be real gold, mustn’t it? Is that sapphire too?” one of the female teachers asked admiringly. I nodded my head with a proud smile.
“How much are you making every month now, Teacher Shen? Oh, I should call you Miss Shen now,” my former English team leader said.
“Well, my boss pays me five thousand yuan a month, not to mention bonuses,” I replied briskly and shrugged my shoulders.
“Wow, that’s how much we make in ten months.”
I relished their envy. I smiled and kept quiet, remembering how they’d shaken their heads and admonished me when I’d quit.
The bell buzzed in all the buildings, giving everyone a start.
“Oh, I have to go to a class now.” One teacher sighed and stood up.
“Yeah, I need to grab that little brat and give him a good beating on the palm,” another said, grabbing a box of chalk and a ruler. All at once, they rushed out the door.
I went to the headmaster’s office on the third floor. Fifteen minutes later, I walked out with a blood-red stamp on my passport application form, but there were five thousand fewer Yuan in my purse. It was the price I had to pay for my first step toward freedom. I had been blackmailed by the headmaster, yet I’d had to swallow it because once again he was the one who held the power.
I took a last look at the school, vowed never to come back, and then shook the dust off my feet.
The next thing to do was submit the application form to the county Public Security Office, fifty miles away from the school.
“It will take sixty days,” the clerk behind the counter told me without showing any emotion on his face. “And I am not sure if you will be granted a passport. If the government thinks you shouldn’t leave the country, your application will be denied,” he warned me by rote while skimming through the application package.
All I could do was look at him helplessly, listen carefully, and pray that he happened to be in good mood and wouldn’t tell me that I needed one more stamp here and another there. Getting out of China seemed to be tougher than climbing to the sky.
Nonetheless, I was still full of hope for going to the UAE. After I went back to Xiamen, I started to say good-bye to my few friends in the city.
One of them opened her eyes wide upon hearing my decision. “Are you crazy, Caroline? Do you know that the UAE is in the desert? You go out the door, and all you can see is sand and more sand.”
“I’m not going there for fun. I just want to get out of here.”
“The women there are all wrapped up in black cloth all year around, only showing their eyes. Are you going to live like that?” she pressed on.
I bit my lips. I could hardly imagine myself in a robe looking like a nun every day, yet all I could do was to pray that this would not be the case. You couldn’t work in a hotel if you were all wrapped up, I told myself.