THAT’S JUST HOW LINE WAS, always acting crazy and stupid. Even she understood that everything she did was crazy, but she insisted on crazy. For her it was intoxicating. This sort of intoxication has been described by writers such as Old Shaw (George Bernard Shaw—Wang Er’s note) in The Flower Girl (aka Pygmalion—Wang Er’s note); the common flower girl Eliza goes to Professor Higgins to be a student. In addition to these two characters, there is also Mrs. Pearce the housekeeper and a Colonel Pickering. Mrs. Pearce understands that a university professor taking in a common flower girl for a student is not only madness but a sort of intoxication. Even though the girl from the gutter is dirty, she could easily be made into a nymph. So she said to the colonel:
“Sir, please don’t teach our master drunken madness!”
When Professor Higgins heard this, he said: “What a life for? What is but drunken madness. Some can’t even be mad! Drunken madness, Mrs. Pearce, you’re really geng!”1
THE EDITOR MIGHT at this point note the errors, but it isn’t necessarily so. Professor Higgins’s specialty was in phonetics and dialects, so in his excitement, he spoke in Tianjinese.2 But here, I digress, I was talking about Line and how she lived her whole life under such an intoxicating madness.
THE FOLLOWING EVENTS were told to me mainly by Line. After returning from the mine, two days passed before Blood-swollen Turtlehead made good on his word and returned the coat. That day, Line’s roommate was there too. Not only that, but she hung out with them. Outside the windows was a sandstorm rumbling like a boiling pot of millet porridge. It wasn’t easy to kick someone out in weather like that. Besides, it had already been established that Blood-swollen Turtlehead was her uncle. There was no reason to ask a roommate to leave just because an uncle was visiting. Line had no choice but to play the sweet niece, peeling apples for uncle Blood-swollen Turtlehead. When she took him out to eat, she introduced him to everyone: my uncle! But people said: I don’t see the resemblance. So Line said: I don’t look like my mom. They said: he’s too young. Line said: he’s my little uncle. They said: how come you are so casual with your uncle? Line said: my little uncle grew up at my house; we played together ever since we were little. When they reached a place with no one else around, she stared Mr. Li in his eyes and said: what are you so smug about? Do I look like your niece?
Mr. Li returned to the mine in the afternoon. As Line walked him out, they finally had a chance to speak in private. Line told him to come see her again on Sunday, after dark, because her roommate worked a night shift that night. After reminding him to be as inconspicuous as possible when he came, she went home to wait for Sunday. Mr. Li couldn’t make up his mind. The only way for him to get to Anyang at night was by train, which arrived nine o’clock at night. Was he sure that Line would let him stay the night? Without company documents, he couldn’t book a hotel. Spending the night at the train station would have been unbearable. Mr. Li was born in the south. He was terrified of the cold. If he had the choice, he would rather shovel shit on the hottest day of the summer than sleep a night in a room without fire or heating. On this fact his mind was made up, but Mr. Li went nevertheless. When Line recounted the event, she said with pouty lips: our Blood-swollen Turtlehead is good to me.
Line said, before Mr. Li got together with her, he was a virgin boy. When a man says something like that, all you can do is nod, it’s not like there is a hymen to speak of. But Line was convinced of this truth. According to Mr. Li himself, before entering into a relationship with Line, he once dated a female classmate one year above him at his university, but they were very proper about it. When I was studying in America, I looked into this story and it turned out to be true. This shifu-aunt of mine wasn’t my shifu’s undergraduate classmate. She wasn’t a classmate from his master’s program either. It wasn’t even the 1970s yet; one might think, what was an American girl doing getting a PhD in science unless she was not fit to have a family? She was short and plump, and when they sat shoulder to shoulder, she let out farts that could practically kill a man. Mr. Li said: I did find her ugly, but no matter what, I couldn’t hurt a girl’s feelings, so I never turned her down.
Even if Mr. Li had been a ladies’ man, I wouldn’t question his loyalty to Line. I wouldn’t want to slander anyone. But if some woman were to seduce him by playing on his pity, he would not have been able to resist. I know this one girl in his graduate seminar who is beautiful beyond belief but also dumb beyond words. When she failed a test, her tears fell like flower petals from a pear tree under the rain. Before letting her retake her test, Mr. Li asked me to tutor her. He gave me all the questions on the test but pretended like it was an accident. After finishing the test for her, I gave the girl all the answers and said: memorize it. If you still can’t pass, you should just kill yourself. That was how she managed to pass with sixty points. From this example, we can assume that if a girl were to go up to Mr. Li and say, “If you don’t have sex with me, I’ll kill myself,” he wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Mr. Li became a revolutionary precisely because his heart was so soft. It wasn’t just a woman’s tears but also the suffering of humanity. He liked to quote Che Guevara: how can I simply let the suffering of others pass me by? That was how he got caught on my shifu-aunt’s fishhook. But later on, the shifu-aunt cried and said, even if you were black, I still wouldn’t be with you. Yellow and white together make strange combinations! In fact, yellow and white mixes are only ugly as infants. When they grow up, every last one of them is a gem like those small but smooth watermelons with pitch-black seeds and crimson red flesh. Even with her clear sampling bias and logical misdirection, Mr. Li believed her. All the farts he smelled were for naught. Nowadays, this woman teaches at the university we all went to. She married an extremely racially complicated Latin American and gave birth to mixed-race kids comprising all different shades and sizes.
Let us now talk about the tryst between Line and Mr. Li. In order to maintain the story’s continuity, the rest of the chapter will be entirely in the third person, without my extra commentaries.
Mr. Li’s second visit to Line was not only on a Sunday but it was December 31. It was a windy day. The wind had turned the sky yellow. The lamps inside the room glowed with a bluish tint. The building where Line lived was a two-story Western-style mansion with a slate roof. The once imposing structure was now a crowded mess. Half a dozen families lived in it, in addition to a woman’s dormitory. That was why when they renovated the building, they added a separate entrance that went directly to the first-floor unit. Her room was spacious with huge windows covering an entire wall. As the wind blew, the window panes clacked like Ping-Pong balls. At dusk, the roommate who lived with her left for her night shift.
As I mentioned, Line’s room was huge. It was three meters wide and nine meters long. The original owner of the home most likely used it as the billiard room. It was probably the most formidable mansion in all of Anyang, but its original inhabitants were no longer around. Its subsequent owners were also no longer around, but the room was still filled with their things. The chests, wardrobes and mirrors took up two-thirds of the space. That was the reason why only two girls lived in such a large space. In the middle of the room hung a mercury lamp, the same as the kind they use on the streets. They were rarely used inside homes because not only did they waste electricity but they were blindingly bright. That wasn’t a problem though. It was a dorm room after all, so the electricity they used was all public. Two unmarried young women lived there, so the electrician was willing to install any kind of light they wanted. The girls didn’t mind the brightness. Aside from those things, there were two iron-frame, single-person beds.
That evening, Line was full of energy. She hoisted two buckets of water and placed them in a corner of the room. She put away the clean sheet that was on the bed and put down a sheet she prepared especially for the occasion. The reason for it was because the last time Mr. Li visited, he sat on her snow-white sheet and left an inky black butt print in the shape of a lotus leaf. Line didn’t mind doing more laundry, but she didn’t want to leave any evidence that someone had been in the room. That was why she also changed out the pillowcase and tossed a dirty blanket over the other bed. In addition, she changed into some dirty clothes. When the set dressing was complete, she sat down to wait. The last bit of daylight was fading (the room faced west, so it had a clear view of the sunset), it was around eight o’clock at night. Mr. Li was just coming out of the train, heading her way against the heavy winds. It would normally have been a forty-minute walk, but in that weather, it took over an hour. Line stood up and kept watch at the window. She couldn’t see anything so she shut the curtains.
Line returned to her bed and sat down to wait for Mr. Li. As the wind howled, she thought about how difficult it was for Mr. Li to come see her. Next time, she would go to him at the mine. But still, she felt anxious. She took a dirty shirt out of the laundry pile under her bed, walked over to a mirror and looked at herself through its dusty surface. She picked up a rag and wiped the mirror before undressing herself in front of it. Before putting on the dirty shirt, she said to herself in the mirror: letting Blood-swollen Turtlehead play with a body like this, have I gone mad?
That night, when Mr. Li arrived at Line’s door, he was blacker than she had expected. This was because on his way to the train station, Mr. Li had passed the coalfields. As he walked, a dust devil made the coal dust gyrate in midair. When he got out of the coalfield, Mr. Li looked as if he had just come up from the mine shaft. After he got off the train, he walked for a long time. The icy wind nearly made his ears fall off. Though every man was by nature horny, that frigid wind had sapped any desire Mr. Li had. All he could think about was: if I don’t show up, a girl will be very sad.
Not only was Mr. Li covered in soot, but he was exhausted to the point of collapse. As the end of the year neared and the mine realized that they weren’t even one-third of the way to their quota, the administrators met and decided to send everyone down into the mine. They had to dig up some more coal before the New Year. At first it was eight hours per shift, then it became twelve and eventually sixteen. At the end, there was no break. They ate in the mine and dozed off when they could no longer stay awake. Like that, they survived thirty-six hours (the original plan was to work into the New Year, which would have broken their own record) but after that, because of exhaustion and the inability to focus, there was an accident and someone died. The leadership felt defeated and let everyone back up. The thirty-hour shift left Mr. Li with just enough time to take a shower before setting out for Line’s place. He took a short nap on the train but it wasn’t nearly enough. As he stood in front of Line’s door, he was in a daze.
Before Mr. Li arrived, Line sat on her bed and mused: even though Blood-swollen Turtlehead was fun to play with, there was no need to go too far with it. Even though she said she wanted to be Blood-swollen Turtlehead’s wife, it would obviously also have been better if she didn’t have to be. It was the same feeling that many women have when shopping: they want to save more money but also buy more things. A better example might be those naturally beautiful young women who want to feel the thrill of romance but don’t want to think about marriage. Yet Line felt different from both of the above-mentioned types. To Line, Blood-swollen Turtlehead was neither a product on a shelf nor a romantic lover boy but rather something in between.
Mr. Li entered through Line’s door and said sleepily: your place sure is warm. After a couple of gaping yawns, he added: hello, Line. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, may God bless you. He was so out of it; his words didn’t pass through his brain. Had he used his brain, he would have realized: we live in the land of the proletarian revolution. Even if there is a God, the old man has no authority here, just as He has no authority over Khomeini.
1 Geng here would mean “clever.”
2 Tianjinese is a Mandarin dialect.