Again Yomei received a letter from Yolan, who was in the USSR now. Before graduating from the Beijing College of Foreign Languages, she had been sent to the University of Leningrad to study Russian literature for three years. Yomei could tell that Father Zhou must have given Yolan a hand in such a career launch. Very likely, Yolan would become a professor someday. She was more at ease with Russian now and even wrote her letters in Cyrillic to Yomei, who always enjoyed reading her sister’s slightly sinicized Russian. Yolan said she missed Beijing and Chongqing a lot but also cherished her time in the Soviet Union, where she had great teachers and friendly classmates. Also, Leningrad still had vestiges of the cultural splendor and elegance it had when it was Saint Petersburg. This letter contained a photo of her and a young man named Li Zongchang. They were both wearing skates and woolen neck warmers, standing on a public rink, beaming with arms around each other. Zongchang was rather skinny and bespectacled and had an intelligent face. He was studying chemistry at the same university in Leningrad. Yolan confessed they were dating seriously. Yomei was happy for her little sister, whose future seemed bright, considering her expertise in Russian literature and the young man she had picked. Zongchang looked steady and earnest and agreeable. They both would come back as soon as they finished their graduate studies there.
Yomei showed the photo to Jin Shan. He praised Zongchang and was happy for Yolan, saying the young fellow was truly extraordinary in spite of his nondescript looks. He was from the countryside in Jiangxi Province and out of tens of thousands of competitors had won a national scholarship for studying abroad. That meant he had a great deal of vitality besides talent. Jin Shan said with self-amusement, “It’s good that Yolan has a Chinese boyfriend, so she won’t come back like a foreign doll, another Lin Lily.”
“Yolan was already in her twenties, a Chinese when she left,” Yomei said. “She’ll have no difficulty adapting back to life here.”
Jin Shan added, “It’s unhealthy to send young kids abroad and let them grow up in a foreign country unless they’re meant to become foreigners who won’t come back.”
“Rest assured, Yolan will be less Russianized than I am,” said Yomei.
Ever since they had married, Yomei and Jin Shan had been talking about having a baby. He was already forty-three and felt that fatherhood might demand too much of him, while she was also nervous about the prospect of motherhood, as she was always busy directing plays. They did try, but she simply couldn’t get pregnant. Deep within, she suspected that it was Jin Shan’s problem—he had slept with so many women that he might have caught some disease that made him no longer able to father a child. But she dismissed the thought and believed it might be too enervating to have a baby by herself anyway. She was even willing to stay childless as long as she and her husband could devote themselves to theater work. But once in a while, she couldn’t help longing to become a mother.
At a family dinner given the previous fall for seeing Yolan off to the Soviet Union, Yomei had spoken with her brother Yang and his second wife, Shi Chee. Yang and Chee had married several years before and now already had a girl and a boy. Yomei said to them that they should consider giving her their next baby, which was already on the way. She promised to love and raise the child as her own. Her request threw Yang and Chee, though they did promise Yomei to think about it seriously. Chee was in her second trimester and would have liked to have another boy, because she believed girls were harder to raise. She told Yomei that she’d give her their third baby if it was a girl. After dinner, while Yomei and Chee were chatting about bringing up children, Yang talked excitedly to Yolan about the USSR, where he had stayed four months two years earlier, having been sent there to enroll in a training program in economics. He loved Russia, both the culture and the people, and also the landscape, though he had always missed noodles and rice when studying in Moscow. It was too bad that nowadays, already a father of two, he couldn’t travel abroad as often as before.
Yolan teased him, “So marriage is a burden to you?”
“I won’t say that. It has stabilized my life too, and the kids give me a lot of joy. Look, even Yomei wants to be a mother now. So don’t wait too long to get married.”
“Will Chee and you give away your next baby to Yomei?”
“We might indeed.”
However, when Shi Chee delivered the child five months later, the newborn turned out to be such a husky boy that she and Yang became reluctant to let him go. So Yomei would have to figure out another way of adopting. In the spring of 1956, she and Jin Shan heard that Duanmu Lanhsin, a Shanghai movie actress, who was sick and penurious, could no longer keep her twins. They had been fathered by a lover of hers, who had been a movie director and recently died of illness. Duanmu wanted to give away one of her twins, so both Yomei and Jin Shan went to Shanghai to take a look at the baby. At the sight of the child, they fell in love with the twenty-one-month-old girl, who was healthy and beautiful, her plump little hand grabbing hold of Yomei’s thumb while she was being dandled, as if the child meant to claim her. Both Jin Shan and Yomei had known Duanmu, who was pleased to see the couple, knowing they’d be fine parents for her baby. So after leaving one thousand yuan with the mother, Yomei and Jin Shan brought the child back to Beijing. They named her Little Lan and managed to obtain a Beijing residential certificate for her.
The presence of the child in their family provided a domestic center, and therefore more stability, for Yomei and Jin Shan. They loved to carry Little Lan in their arms, even within the household. They talked about finding a kindergarten for her, but thought better of it. Instead, they hired a nanny, since someone ought to be home when they were out at work and since their household needed to be more like a complete family now. The toddler seemed at home with her adoptive parents and took them as her playmates. She enjoyed taking a horse ride on Jin Shan’s back and playing with Yomei. She called them Dad and Mom since day one. In the evenings, she enjoyed listening to her mother read stories to her. When Yomei had work to do, the nanny, Mansu, would step in, reading “small people’s books” (picture books) with Little Lan. The child’s eagerness to learn amused her parents. Jin Shan said Little Lan took after her birth father, who had written small plays and contributed articles to periodicals regularly. Jin Shan also confessed to Yomei that he’d never thought it would be so gratifying to be a father.
Indeed, the child gave him an excuse whenever he was reluctant to socialize with visitors. He would carry up Little Lan and withdraw into his study, as if to claim he’d better take the child away so that guests could have a peaceful time with Yomei. Some of the visitors would smile and say they had never imagined him becoming a devoted parent. Yomei was also grateful for the child’s arrival, which gave a center to their family. As a result, their life felt more self-sufficient. Nowadays, seldom did she go and visit the Zhous, giving the excuse of having to babysit at home, though Mother Deng often urged her to bring along the child. She and Father Zhou both wanted to see Little Lan, in any case. It came to Yomei that they would probably claim her daughter as a grandchild if they liked her.
Besides running the directorial seminar at the Central Academy of Drama, Yomei had been translating some theoretical writings on the theater arts for use as teaching materials. She was also in charge of translating four of Carlo Goldoni’s plays, which were under contract with the People’s Literature Publishing House. She didn’t know Italian, but Goldoni’s works were available in Russian, so she translated the plays from the Russian sources. She was the editor of the volume, and also translated two of the four plays by herself, The Servant of Two Masters and The Mistress of the Inn, while the other two were done by others. Yomei had seen some of Goldoni’s plays staged in Moscow and had been deeply impressed. Now she’d like to stage The Servant of Two Masters here. Luckily, her proposal for performing the play was approved by the Ministry of Culture without incident, so she began to assemble the production crew and even thought of forming a new theater for this play and her future work.
Her aunt Jun’s husband, Yida, also loved Goldoni. Though in recent years Yida had been doing propaganda work in the Tianjin municipality, he used to be an actor and had been noted for several small roles. He and Jun were still living in Tianjin city, but whenever they were in the capital, they would come to catch up with Yomei and Jin Shan. Yida admired Yomei for translating and reproducing Goldoni’s plays, which he said were real masterpieces and would be more valuable as time went by. “You can say they’re already immortal,” Yida said about Goldoni’s plays. It was too bad he had stopped acting or he’d have done everything to join Yomei’s production. Out of his love for theater, he was also respectful of Jin Shan, whom both Yida and Jun viewed as a great theater artist.
When the couple were in town, Jin Shan cooked a fine meal to show his appreciation of their visit. On the last Sunday of July, Jun and Yida came again, and Jin Shan made their favorite dish: braised pork. The whole house was redolent with the aroma of the dish. Jin Shan explained to them that he used a special rice wine for the pork, and that the flame under the pot must be kept low to stew the meat thoroughly and to collect the juice. He also put in a piece of rock sugar besides assorted spices, including aniseed and dried chili. “Above all,” he added, “you must put your heart into your cooking. If you cook for someone you love, the food usually tastes better.” That made everyone chuckle. Jun and Yida kept sniffing the air, saying they couldn’t wait for dinner to start.
But as Jin Shan carried the pot to the dining table, he accidentally dropped it, and it fell with a thwack, the floor now strewn with browned pork cubes that surrounded his feet, steaming. An orphan chopstick was lying among the meat, while the other one had disappeared. He froze, too staggered to do anything. He released a deep sigh, standing there motionless. Yomei rushed over and set about cleaning the mess with a broom and dustpan and then wiped the floor clean with a terry cloth.
She told him, “Don’t feel too bad about this. Jun and Yida are not strangers. You can make the same dish for them when they come again.”
The guests tried to console him, saying they must not have any luck given that they wouldn’t be able to eat something so nice today. They then made him promise to cook the same dish next time. Yomei placed a pot of boiled rice on the table. Before spooning the plump and glossy rice into bowls, she gave Mansu, the nanny, two ten-yuan bills and sent her to a nearby restaurant for some chicken and vegetable dishes.