WHILE I WAS still waiting to hear about the passport, Song told me that he wanted Old Two and me to accompany him to the city of Harbin for a business trip. Although I was worried that I might miss some news about my passport application, I agreed to go since I knew my nerves would break down just like an overwound clock if I allowed myself to sit around immersed in my UAE dream for one more day.
So at the end of September, the three of us boarded an early morning plane to Beijing and then changed to another one for Harbin. A few hours later, we arrived in that dirty and disorderly city in the northernmost part of China. Black smoke came out of the many chimneys of the industrial compounds surrounding the city. People in heavy coats and ski masks biked around hurriedly, fighting with the harsh wind. We hopped in a taxi. After a couple of hours’ ride, we finally reached our destination—a bankrupt warp-knitting factory in a small town somewhere close to the border of Russia. We looked around. It felt as if this town had been deserted years ago. The streets were empty, decorated sparsely with bare trees. The sun felt cold. The landscape looked like something from a dark oil painting by a depressed artist.
The head of the factory showed us the machines that were for sale, walking with hunched shoulders and arms folded inside the sleeves of his wadded jacket. Although it wasn’t yet October, in this part of China it was already chilly like deep winter, and I could hear the sound of my teeth chattering.
We rushed back to Harbin that evening and checked into what was supposedly the best hotel in the city. In a lifeless restaurant, we had a much-too-salty and spicy dinner and then headed back to the hotel right away. The steam heaters hissed in the hotel room, but it seemed like they weren’t putting out any heat at all. I crawled under the freezing quilt and felt my throat itching from the extremely polluted air.
Suddenly I missed Xiamen so much, missed the growing grass and the nightingales in the air, missed the gorgeous sunshine and the palm trees on the beaches, missed my small but warm room. I realized that everything is relative, and without comparison you could never tell what’s good or bad. Why did I want to leave Xiamen so badly? I started to ask myself in the dark.
Three days later, the bargaining between Song and the head of the factory was finally done, and we didn’t waste one minute getting on a plane back to Beijing.
We wandered in the shopping area of the Beijing airport to kill time during the two-hour layover. I saw boxes of moon cakes all over the counters, and suddenly I realized that the next day was the Moon Festival, a traditional Chinese festival when families gather together under what is supposedly the roundest moon of the year and enjoy these moon-shaped cakes.
I strolled along the counters looking at the rows of moon cakes in fancy packaging and marveling at the variety of cakes made these days. I remembered that when I was young, the only moon cakes available were filled with sweetened bean paste, but now I saw moon cakes with egg yolk, lotus bud, sesame, coffee, and even chocolate filling.
I stopped at a ruby-red tray with six cakes on it that was installed on top of a music box. Every time you turned the tray, euphonic music played. I immediately liked it and decided to buy it for my mother and mail it to her. Though the Moon Festival, with its expensive cakes, had rarely been celebrated in my family, a peasant family where everyone hated each other, I wanted to let my mother know that now everything was different, and the Moon Festival didn’t just belong to city people any more but also to an ordinary family like ours.
Just after I handed the money to the saleswoman, my cell rang.
My mother’s sobbing voice burst through the phone. Something was wrong again. I had thought that my family wouldn’t bring me tears any more, now that I was making money and making them happy, but apparently I had been wrong.
“Your sister is pregnant,” she cried.
A sick feeling started to spread through my chest. Spring was barely twenty.
“Whose baby?” I asked. I had never heard that she had a boyfriend.
“This bastard called Ming. He is married, thirty years old, with a kid,” my mother bawled.
I couldn’t believe it. My sister, my only sister, was pregnant with the child of a married man, just like five years ago when I had gotten pregnant by Pan.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked feebly.
“The little bitch thinks he will get divorced and marry her. Stupid bitch. Even if he is willing to, we will never let her marry him,” she swore.
“Can I talk to her?”
“She won’t talk to anybody! She thinks we’re all her enemies. First she ran to the road and wanted to get herself killed by a truck. Luckily we pulled her back just in time. And now she’s locked herself in her room and won’t come out.”
“How did this all happen? Did you have any idea about this guy before this happened?”
“How could we know what your sister was doing? She keeps everything a secret. The guy told her he wasn’t married, and one day he sent his wife and daughter away and had your sister visit the house, and when she wanted to leave he locked the door. I gave him a good slap on the face when your father and I grabbed him yesterday. He cried and promised to solve the problem in a week. Now he’s just disappeared. Nobody can find him.
“Oh, God.” My mother sobbed for a few seconds and then cried out, “Little bitch, how could she ruin our lives like this? She will never find a decent husband now. She’s a broken shoe. What are your father and I going to do now? We’ll never have a good family. We are doomed.”
“Just calm down, Mama. I’ll fly back right now. You need to take care of yourself.”
“How can I care about myself in a situation like this? Our family is ruined. I was so upset that I fell from the top of the stairs, all because of this little bitch. I cannot move at all. I’ve just been lying on the bed!”
Her voice made my head ache. I leaned my forehead on my palm. Tragedy was never tired of visiting our family.
“Son of a bitch,” she continued. “We will take him to the arbitration court and have him compensate us for our loss!” She ground her teeth with hatred.
“I’ll catch the earliest flight today.”
My words seemed to comfort her a little and she fell into quiet sobs. After a moment, she said, “If anybody asks you why you came back, don’t mention anything about your sister. If the villagers know this, they’ll laugh at us until the day I go to the grave. Your sister will never be able to find a husband if word gets out.”
So instead of returning to Xiamen, I boarded the next plane to Shanghai. With a heavy mind and the music box with the tray of moon cakes in my hands, I arrived home early in the evening, when the lamps in the Shen Hamlet had just started to go on.
I stepped over the threshold into our house and went straight upstairs. Seeing my sighing mother on the bed and my distressed father sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his head, tears came to my eyes. I felt the familiar, tense air that had accompanied me throughout my childhood and youth. I told myself to be strong, because right then I was the only string that was holding my family together.
I cleared my throat. “Could it be possible that they really do love each other and Ming will divorce his wife for Spring?” I asked my parents calmly.
“Never. Don’t even think about it. I will never allow it to happen.” My father raised his head and bellowed at me with a stiffened neck and red face. “The man is thirty. Instead of the thousands of single young men out there, why did she have to mess herself up with all these old married men? I would rather disown her than allow her to marry some divorced guy.”
Suddenly I couldn’t control myself any more. I glared at him. “Don’t blame Spring only, Dad. Ask yourself, have you ever been a father to her? She wants old men, yes. Why? Have you thought about why? Maybe it is because you, her father, have never been there for her.”
He put his arms down and looked at me, startled. “Are you saying—she misbehaves, she ruins herself with married men, all because of me?”
He was hurt. He didn’t have the slightest idea of how much Spring and I had been wounded by my mother’s affair and his retreat from our lives, how much damage they had done to us. He would never fully understand.
I left the room. I knocked on Spring’s door gently, wanting to say something to her. There was no response. I stood there for a while. My sister was just on the other side of the door, yet I felt like she was so far away from me. I imagined her sitting in the dark in pain alone, and I wished that she and I knew each other better.
After a fruitless two-day search for Ming, who seemed to have vanished from the earth, we finally decided to take the matter to the arbitration court in the hopes that a summons from the government to his family would be sufficient to bring him out of whatever hole he was hiding in.
The next day, in the town’s arbitration house, we waited a long time for Ming to show up. It was almost noon. Small Uncle was sitting on the long wooden bench along the wall with his arms crossed, his face boiling with anger toward Spring, who had brought such shame to the entire family. Our Aunt Jasmine, who had traveled here from her village two hours away, arriving early that morning, sat on the bench next to him, staring at the floor with tears on her face. Our mother’s older brother, Big Uncle, who had left his fish stand unattended in the market, leaned against the wall smoking silently, still wearing his fishing boots. For a country family, a young girl pregnant with a married man’s baby was humiliating and serious enough to gather together all the family members to try to come up with a solution. My parents were notably absent, though. My mother was too weak to come, and my father simply refused to be in such an official and serious place.
It was quiet, except for the drops leaking from the corner of the ceiling in the old cement room and the sound of the arbitrator, Old Yao, taking long, loud sips from his clay teacup. If my family hadn’t begged him to solve the matter quietly inside the arbitration house, Old Yao would have been on his bicycle riding all over the countryside searching for the “dirty little shit” Ming.
Spring was sitting motionless on one of the square wooden stools at Old Yao’s desk with her back straight, staring vacantly at the Chinese rose swaying in the breeze outside the window. It was the first time I’d seen her since I’d flown back. Her eyelids were swollen, her face wan and sallow. One corner of her mouth was curled upward, the way it always used to be when she stood aside, watching our father beating me with the bamboo broom.
I wondered what she was thinking and feeling. I knew she must have been feeling scared, otherwise she wouldn’t have told our parents about her pregnancy. But did she still hate our mother for forbidding her affair? Did she blame our father for threatening Ming and therefore scaring him away? Did she still believe Ming’s promises? Did she expect him to prove he loved her today? I knew she hated me for flying home, hated Aunt Jasmine for coming all the way from her village, hated Small Uncle and Big Uncle for dropping all their business for her. I knew that she hated herself, hated everyone. But did she have any idea what her family was feeling, how much shame she had brought to them?
Gazing at her familiar thin eyebrows and flat nose, I suddenly had the impulse to clutch her shoulders and shake her until she came back to life.
The day before, while she was locked up in her room, I had bicycled down the coal-ash road for an hour to Ming’s work unit in the hope of finding him. In the remote coal factory run by Ming’s family, I had sat on a red bench for hours, waiting for his haughty uncle, the owner, to show up. The women outside the window had whispered loudly about what a bad, loose woman my sister was to have enticed the poor man, saying that our family, back to the eighteenth generation of ancestors, should jump out of their tombs for what Spring had done. I kept quiet with my head lowered. The owner never showed up.
The sound of a roaring motorcycle broke into my thoughts. Everyone straightened their backs and turned toward the door, except for Spring, who sat still. The round belly of Ming’s uncle appeared, wrapped in a suit. He passed the steel security bars, followed by a short square-faced man with a hanging head and his hands in the pockets of a suit full of creases. From everyone’s angry eyes, I knew that he must be Ming. I wanted to break his face and watch it crumble to bits.
Old Yao pointed Ming to a stool next to Spring’s. Ming started to talk in a low, withered voice: “I told her from the very first day that I was married and had a lovely daughter. She might have told you that I held the wooden bar to the door, not letting her go. Well, she was lying. She slept with me of her own will. I can’t get a divorce for her. This is ridiculous.”
I was gratified to see Spring shaking, finally coming to life a little. Old Yao frowned as Ming continued with his story.
A woman with a stupefied grayish face walked into the room and stood behind Ming. She was so tall and thin that she reminded me of the compasses I had used in my geometry classes. I wondered if she was Ming’s wife. Perhaps it was she who had cooked up this story, to humiliate that little bitch, Spring.
Ming finished talking and was now staring at the ends of his shoes. It was Spring’s turn. She gazed at the floating green leaves in the tea glass in front of her. It looked like she was gathering her thoughts, while those of us who knew her were all worried that she might collapse. Abruptly, she grabbed the glass and splashed the tea in Ming’s face.
Before anybody could react, the thin woman, Ming’s wife, lunged at Spring and started to strangle her, her teeth bared and hatred all over her face. Standing closest to Spring, without thinking I pounced on the woman, grabbing the back of her striped coat and trying to pull her claws away from Spring’s neck. Like a mad lioness, the woman turned around and attacked me. I had never even been able to kill a chicken, and soon my glasses were on the ground and the woman was pulling my hair hard. Small Uncle ran over and forced her arms down. Her body was still twisting, and her mouth was pouring out the most malicious curses I had ever heard. Before I had the chance to catch my breath, Aunt Jasmine was clutching at Ming’s face while he was trying to knock Small Uncle’s legs out from under him to help his wife, and Ming’s uncle was wrestling with Big Uncle on the floor. Old Yao and Xiao Chen, a young mediator, were jumping up and down, flustered and exasperated, yelling at everyone to stop.
Furious, Old Yao shut my family outside the security bars while the other family stayed inside. Big Uncle and Small Uncle stood there puffing and blowing with their hands on their hips and giving Spring angry looks. Aunt Jasmine pointed at Spring, weeping and wailing to her about how stupid she was and how much shame she had brought to the family.
I clasped the steel bars with my fingers. I could feel warm tears flowing down my face, mixing with the blood from the bridge of my nose and my neck where Ming’s wife had scratched it open. I was fighting alongside these illiterate peasants when I could have been sipping wine with my American clients in warm, civilized Xiamen. I could have been sitting on the Italian leather couch in the lounge of the Marco Polo Hotel as someone played Mozart on the piano and the waiter handed me a martini. Instead, I was stuck in the mad world of the Shen Hamlet.
I turned away from the bars, and through my teary eyes I saw Spring standing before me. We stood face to face, looking at each other silently. She reached out her finger, touched the scratched spots on my face, and gently wiped the blood off my nose. She was crying. On her chin I saw the tiny round black dot that I had left many years ago when I stabbed her with my ballpoint pen to stop her from pretending to cry to get our mother’s attention. I saw the little pink scar on her forehead from a rock thrown by a man chasing her after she had stolen peaches from his trees when she was only seven. I saw myself holding her small soft hands when she was a little girl, as we huddled together in a corner when our parents were hitting and cursing at each other. I saw her growing up and coming to the crossroads of life on her own and trying to figure out which way to go. I saw her as another me, young but scarred, looking for love everywhere but making mistakes again and again.
I am sorry, Meimei, I thought.
A couple of days later, with the fifteen thousand yuan that Ming had eventually agreed to pay as compensation, my mother took Spring to the hospital two towns away for a secret abortion.
“Did she say it hurt?” I asked my mother as casually as I could manage after they had come back and Spring had gone up to her room.
“No, the little bitch is lucky. They used anesthesia. She said it didn’t hurt at all.”
“Mama, can you and Dad try not to call her ‘little bitch’ in the future and not yell at her for ruining her own future?” I suggested carefully. “It’s like putting salt on her wounds.”
“How can I not yell at her? Her face is still swollen from the motorcycle accident, and now she just had an abortion. How is she ever going to learn if I don’t remind her?”
I sighed and said nothing. Spring had undergone a neardeath accident and had had to get an abortion after getting pregnant with a married man. I hoped this would be enough to teach her to think more carefully from then on. But why should I expect her to learn? What about myself? Had I ever learned from my mistakes?
At least she wouldn’t have to remember the feeling of the iron rod inside her for the rest of her life, and at least Mama had been outside the room when she was on the operating table. But it couldn’t feel good to have our parents know about it.
After the abortion, there was finally some peace in the house. Spring went back to Zhenze to tend to her clothing shop. Still angry with her, my father remained uncommunicative as usual. I didn’t feel I could just leave the family in this state, so I talked to Song and got permission to stay an extra week in the hamlet.
My mother and I often sat at the window, looking at the rows of vegetables in the fields and chitchatting with each other. Eventually, she stopped crying whenever she thought of Spring. I found that she had turned old overnight, as if transformed by a magic wand. With the sound of chickens cooing and dogs barking in the background, I told her about my life in Xiamen and tried my best to convince her that life could only get better, because I would make more money and Spring would behave now.
“Mama, where is Honor?” I asked her. I hadn’t seen him once.
She sighed helplessly. “He rarely comes now. We’re both getting old, and our children have grown up. His business is not doing well. Besides, your sister exhausts me. How can I have the energy to care about Honor now?”
I had mixed feelings. The ten-year affair between my mother and Honor had brought so much agony to everyone that I was relieved to see it ending, yet I wasn’t sure I would get used to a home without him.
My mother liked the music box with the moon cakes very much. The six moon cakes filled with egg yolk and lotus buds were like treasures to her, and she ate each of them very slowly. She held the music box carefully in her lap and smiled whenever I turned the tray to make the jingling music play. Her dry, wrinkled fingers, which were used to touching only dirt, didn’t match the vivid ruby-red tray. Her excitement and shy, almost girlish smiles made me feel like crying.
“Mama, I would like you to come to Xiamen with me.”
She lifted her eyebrows high. “Uh, you mean taking an airplane?”
“Yes, take the plane to Xiamen and then take the plane back. You can stay for a month with me and have a vacation. I can take you to the ocean. You’ve never been to the ocean.”
I saw her eyes flashing with excitement, but then she shook her head. “No, I’d better not go. Too much money. Nobody in the hamlet has ever been on a plane except that son of a bitch Beiling, and you, of course.”
I responded with disdain. “Mama, don’t mention that evil person. Everybody knows where his money comes from—embezzled from the Communist government. And who said that only he, Beiling, can step out of the rice fields and go to the beach? Nobody else can? No, I want to show people that you, Feng Lin Yun, my mother, an illiterate peasant woman, can board a plane and lie on the beach too! Who said that once you are born a peasant, you’ll always be a peasant? I can’t wait for the day when that son of a bitch goes to jail. Embezzlement, murder, plus all the women he raped. Maybe he’ll even get a bullet.”
My mother shushed me. “Lower your voice! Don’t you ever say things like that in the hamlet. And don’t ever tell people you worked as a secretary in the South. I always tell them that you worked with computers, translating. Otherwise people think you’re making dirty money, like all the girls hooking in the South.”
I thanked God that I had left this place and didn’t have to give a damn any more about whatever was going on in these people’s minds.
The night before my mother and I left for Xiamen, Spring and I shared a bed just like we had when we were little. For a while, we lay quietly in the dark and let our thoughts run free.
“Meimei,” I called her gently. “Are you feeling a little better now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.” I could sense her smiling in the dark, helplessly.
“Meimei, I understand why you like older men. It’s because our father was never there for us when we were little, because we grew up in a broken family. You and I never felt safe and protected. Married men have families, and we’re jealous of their families, so we want to have our own families.” Having gone through so many men in my life and having condemned myself continuously, I had finally figured out why Spring and I were drawn toward married men like moths to a light.
“I feel the same way. I don’t like younger men. They’re reckless and unreliable,” she said.
“I know. I understand.” I was happy that she was finally willing to open up to me. I kept nodding my head, though I knew she couldn’t see me. “Just don’t feel bad about yourself, okay? It’s not your fault.”
“But society doesn’t think that way,” she said dryly. “Jiejie, I am jealous of you. You can leave the hamlet and be on your own.”
“You can leave too, if you really want. In fact, you can come to Xiamen to stay with me for a while. Just let me. I’ll pay all the expenses. You can decide if you like the outside world or the hamlet better.” I paused. “Just remember, your fate is in your own hands. You can control it yourself if you really want.”
She hummed in the dark, half confused, half understanding.
“Meimei,” I said gingerly. “Don’t hate Mama and Dad, okay?”
She remained silent.
I continued. “It’s hard to believe, but whatever Mama and Dad do for us, they think they are doing it for our own good. After what I’ve gone through, I’ve learned that family is always family and will always be there for you, because we share the same blood.”
“Jiejie, I’ll be careful now,” she promised me.