MR. LI WALKED INTO THE CONFERENCE room. It was a big room with a big square table in the middle. There were two people sitting at the table. One was the vice president of the mine. The other was a girl wearing an army coat that was unbuttoned; under the coat was a blue uniform with the rim of a bright red sweater peeping out of the collar. She had fair skin, a peach round face, and watery eyes; with her small mouth and red lips, she was beautiful. This situation wasn’t hard to explain. A pretty girl showed up at the mine and the vice president was welcoming her—what was so peculiar about that? But why was she looking for me? Then, when I thought about it, I realized I recognized the girl. I had seen her at the mining school and at the cadre school, but I didn’t know her name. When the girl looked up and saw Mr. Li, she let out a brisk: uncle! Mr. Li was perplexed: what? I’m her uncle? I don’t have any siblings, where would I get a niece from? The vice president said: a reunion of uncle and niece, I will be out of your way. Mr. Li thought: you think I’m her uncle too? Line (this girl was Line. The two were uncle and niece in name, but villains in fact!—Wang Er’s note) said: goodbye, mister. After he left, Mr. Li asked: am I really your uncle? Like a bolt of lightning, Line pinched him on the shoulder and said: I’ll fuck your ma! Are you trying to play seniority with me? I’m Line! Mr. Li thought: a niece fucking an uncle’s mother, wouldn’t that be an affront to her great-aunt? Let’s keep an open mind about this.
But the name Line wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. At the cadre school, every day when he got home from work, there was a note left by someone by the name of Line under his pillow. It was something Line snuck in to put there when everyone else was out working. The notes revealed the love she felt for Mr. Li. Some of the notes were plainly written:
Blood-swollen Turtlehead, I love you!—Line
Some of the notes were rather formal:
Dear Blood-swollen Turtlehead, hello!
I love you.
And hereby offer
the salute of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!
—Line
Some notes were flirtatious:
My darling big turtlehead, I really miss you. Do you miss me?—Line
Some were minimalist to the point of being incomprehensible:
Blood, turtle: love. Line.
When Mr. Li saw those notes, he was all the more convinced that he was trapped in a dream.
AS FOR LINE’S personal conduct, aside from what I have already described, I would like to add the following: this person dared to say anything and everything. During the Cultural Revolution, in addition to fuck, there was another commonly used word that sounded like cunt but with a velar sound at the beginning. After becoming the professor’s wife, she gave up using profanities, at least in Chinese. Nowadays, she works at my school’s English department. Once, when she was giving a sabbatical abroad prep course, she called one of her students (who was actually a high-ranking official) a “silly cunt.” For that, she had gotten a reprimand from the school. They told her to write a confession. She confessed: I was afraid that she would run into trouble abroad so I wanted to prepare her. After said comrade goes abroad, I am certain someone will call her a “silly cunt,” because she is a silly cunt! When the school read the confession, they didn’t say anything. They probably thought: let’s keep an open mind about this.
Line said she had already fallen in love with Mr. Li at the cadre school. But there was no opportunity to get near him. Later, when Mr. Li was transferred to Henan, she tailed him. Of course, it wasn’t easy to accomplish; but her motto always was, where there’s a will, there’s a way. She used her old man’s solid connections to become a nurse in Anyang, figured out where Blood-swollen Turtlehead was, and delivered herself. She had an elaborate plan for all of it, including calling Mr. Li uncle. When they were finally alone together, they were in a small ravine on the coal mountain. That was a part of the plan also. She suddenly said to Blood-swollen Turtlehead: I want to be with you! That was an essential element of the plan. After that, she looked for an expression on Mr. Li’s face. She found Mr. Li’s expression to be completely out of her expectation: he closed his eyes. Suddenly, she was flustered: this Blood-swollen Turtlehead can’t possibly be rejecting me, can he?
Mr. Li said he thought a long time about it and decided that it was a trap. This was more than likely the work of his conniving Indian roommate. How did a pretty young girl just show up to tell me that she wants to be with me? After thinking about it for a long time, he decided to look for some answers. He opened his eyes and asked, what do you mean? The question made Line feel self-conscious and a bit embarrassed. After a long awkward silence, she said, what do I mean? I want to be your wife, duh.
When people learned that I could write novels, they came to me with their love stories. In their minds, their love stories were worthy of being written into novels, and even entering the literary canon. To these people, my door was always open. But when I turned their stories into novels, I always used the first-person male perspective. It was partly because it was easier to write what I knew, but it was also so that I could get some vicarious thrill out of it. But when it comes to Mr. Li’s love story, I refuse to use the first person because for me, it is a sad story. Line should have been my wife, but she became Mrs. Blood-swollen Turtlehead!
When Line said, “I want to be your wife, duh,” her heart nearly skipped a beat. Frankly, the notion had never crossed her mind before that moment. She really just wanted to have some fun with Mr. Li and maybe mess with his head a little. But when Mr. Li said, you should think hard about this, she became agitated and said, I’m going to be your wife if it’s the last thing I do! You think I’m scared? Thus, tragedy ensued. Mr. Li added: this isn’t something to joke around about; Line said: I want to slap that mouth of yours. Mr. Li thought: let’s keep an open mind about this.
After that, Mr. Li said, of course, as far as I’m concerned, there are no problems; that was all he said. Line snarled back, as far as I’m concerned, there are no problems either. Suddenly, she screamed: oh crap, it’s eleven thirty. I have to catch the bus. It turned out that there was only one bus that went from Anyang to the mine, it departed early in the morning and returned at noon. If she missed it, it would have been two days before the next bus. She quickly told Mr. Li how to find her and reminded him to say that he was her uncle. With that, she ran out to catch her bus. She needed to run fast so she took off her coat and handed it to Mr. Li. Like that, Line ran off. Had it not been for that coat, it all would have amounted to nothing because Mr. Li was convinced that a girl showing up out of nowhere wanting to be his wife must have been the sequence from a dream. He doubted if there was actually a person called Line in this world. Under such a circumstance, he would have thought it much too risky to go to Anyang. If after a three-hour bus ride to Anyang, it all turned out to be a prank played on him by his Indian roommate, he would have been crushed. But the coat provided some sort of reassurance, it gave him the courage to go to Anyang. If he found Line, that would have been great. If not, at least he would get to keep the coat.
When Mr. Li recounted the events of that day, he pointed out that a girl announced she would be his wife, said a few words, then disappeared. When he ran out after her, all he saw was a figure speeding toward the road where a bus was just arriving. After a minute, a sandstorm blocked his line of sight (Mr. Li was extremely myopic, he wore the bottoms of glass bottles on his face—Wang Er’s note); a minute later, the sandstorm settled, erasing all traces of person and bus. It was like seeing a ghost in the middle of the day. At the time, he didn’t know that Line was a star runner of the four-hundred-meter dash, eight-hundred-meter dash, and fifteen-hundred-meter run. She was in the habit of using this skill of hers and ran everywhere. Her standing on her high school track team wasn’t the only proof of this, you could also tell just by the contour of her body. Her body didn’t look yellow, white, or black, it looked like the bodies of those runners first to the finishing line that you see on sports TV. Had it been twenty years in the future, no one would have allowed someone like her to go running off doing who knows what in Henan because they would have tossed her into a stadium and made her earn a gold medal and raise the national flag—such things would have been more important than blood-swollen turtleheads.
As for the last point, I was exaggerating when I said that she ran everywhere, but Line was known to use her talent indiscriminately at school, which had led to controversy. She was already a forty-year-old woman, right around the age of your typical midlife crisis, but she wasn’t interested in putting on a pair of high heels. In the summer, it was too hot to wear sneakers, so she wore a pair of soft-soled sandals. Her hair was as short as it could go and she wore no accessories (accessories don’t affect speed but can easily be lost during running, leading to financial loss—Wang Er’s note); while chatting on the lawn, she realized that it was time for class, so she tied the bottom of her pongee blouse into a knot, rolled up her pencil skirt, revealing her black silk panties and a pair of thin, long, muscular legs that didn’t at all appear like those of a middle-aged woman, and broke into a sprint. The faces of the Chinese professors went pale. But when the foreign professors with their suits and briefcases saw her, they cheered: Mrs. Li! Fucking! Good! They swung their ties over their shoulders as if they were nooses and ran after her.
In this chapter, we talked about how Line first expressed her feelings to Mr. Li, about how she left her coat in Mr. Li’s hands, and about how she ran to catch the bus. From there, we discussed Line’s passion for running. In the summer, when she spontaneously ran, her imperious legs were fully unleashed. But none of these ideas get to the heart of the problem. That task would be better served by describing our time at the pool together. Allow me to illustrate. She climbed out of the pool—pushed against the edge of the pool with her hands—and pushed herself up, the critical moment being the push. In that moment, I saw the sleekest elegant line, and after seventeen years, that line hadn’t changed. If you were to scrutinize, you would notice that the breasts had gotten slightly larger; but that is a change for the better. Originally, those two breasts of Line’s weren’t big enough. Even taking into account the fact that she is the lean, agile type, they were still relatively small. Now, she was flawless. I refuse to believe a woman like her can remain loyal to Blood-swollen Turtlehead for a lifetime, or that we have been in love since age seventeen, but we have never made love; it just isn’t right. So I said: if your red plum flower were to ever reach over the fence, don’t forget about me.
When Line heard this, she paused for a moment and said: if your words are to praise my beauty, then I am very pleased, and would like to treat you to a meal. To be able to receive such a compliment at the age of forty is rather satisfying. But if you were meaning something else, then I should slap your mouth. Supposing that you won’t mind, of course. If you do mind, then I won’t. It wouldn’t be worth it to lose a friendship of twenty-some years over a slap. So which do you mean? Of course I didn’t want to get slapped so I said: the first one, of course. But I also wanted to know why. She said she didn’t know why, but she had made up her mind long ago that other than Blood-swollen Turtlehead, she would never sleep with another man.