by Isabelle Li
When she finished, we sat down to memorise Chinese medicine recipes. ‘Angelica, six grams; rehmannia, nine grams; liquorice root, four grams …’
I looked up at her face. ‘What’s this for?’
‘For prostatitis, a common problem with the prostate.’
‘Where’s the prostate?’ I pressed on my tummy.
‘You don’t have one. It’s the gland surrounding the urethra in men.’
‘Mum, aren’t you a gynaecologist?’
‘Yes, but infertility is a complex topic. Sometimes it has to do with men.’
I sat on her lap, feeling the warmth of her breasts and the brightness of the morning sunlight, trying to stay awake.
Once a month, we visited Grandpa Ho.
Grandpa Ho had retired. My mother said he was the most brilliant Chinese doctor, very accomplished in the non-surgical treatment of gynaecological maladies. He lived in a grey building with long, dark corridors. Before the coldest days of the winter, we helped him to seal the window frames with strips of newspaper and flour paste. But the room was still cold. He wore a cotton coat, a pair of fingerless gloves and a knitted hat that looked like a half watermelon. He and my mother read books that were bound by threads and he wrote down Chinese medicine recipes on rice paper using ink brushes. He warmed his hands on a kerosene stove before writing.
A term they frequently used was ‘endometriosis’. I asked what it was. My mother said the uterus is like a room with brick walls and the internal lining is like the plaster. When the plaster spills out of the room and spreads to other parts of the house, the woman is sick. She may have a lot of pain and she may have difficulty conceiving a baby.
I listened and visualised the inside of my tummy with different compartments, each shimmering with a different colour. My intestines, a lively green; my stomach, an active orange; my heart, a shining gold; but my uterus, with its internal lining flipped out like a poorly patched sandbag, multi-coloured with inconsistent patterns on each side. I could almost feel the pain of endometriosis.
‘Does Aunty Shi have endometriosis?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ my mother said, kissing me on my forehead.
‘You’ll grow up to be a doctor as good as your mum,’ Grandpa Ho said with a hissing voice and a metallic chuckle, his thin shoulders rising and all his wrinkles stretching upwards. He was slowly losing his voice.
My father was not happy about our visits. He said it was unfortunate that Grandpa Ho’s children were estranged from him, but it was not my mother’s responsibility to take care of him. My father was cutting vegetables and he waved the chopper to emphasise his point.
‘Why did they break up with him?’ I asked, standing on the threshold to the kitchen, wearing my winter hat with earflaps and my mittens. I liked watching my parents cooking, as I got to test the dishes.
‘Old Ho was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution because he was born into a rich family and has relatives abroad.’ My father was mincing the pork now. He had to bend his head under the shelf because he was too tall for the chopping area. ‘His children are silly not to reconcile with him. If I had any overseas connections, I’d send all three of you abroad to study.’
‘But I am only six,’ I said.
‘I meant university.’ My father smiled at me.
We did not visit Grandpa Ho for a while.
Then my mother told me Grandpa Ho was very ill.
It was a cold day and the roadsides were covered with strips of ice. My mother urged me to walk quickly, not allowing me to slide on the ice. I fell once in the snow. She lifted me up, forgetting to pat the snow off my pants. The streets were quiet, except for the crows on the dry branches, crying against a grey sky.
We climbed the stairs and walked through the dark corridor. The low-voltage light bulbs were covered in grease and cast dim light on dusty shelves crammed with discarded liberation army shoes, rusty spare parts of bicycles, mooncake boxes, asphalt felt, and other unidentifiable items. My mother had reminded me to empty my bladder before leaving home and told me not to touch anything. She walked in front of me, careful with her steps, holding my hand behind her back. Through the closed doors on both sides of the corridor, we heard women singing, babies crying, men talking. At the shared bathroom, a woman in pyjamas was cleaning a potty. In the communal kitchen, someone was frying chilli in hot oil.
When we knocked on the door, a woman I had not seen before opened it. Her face was high on the sides and low in the middle, as if her eyes, nose and lips were squashed towards a centre line. It looked vaguely like a backside. Two strange men were sitting inside the room.
Grandpa Ho lay in his bed, breathing audibly. His face looked like bare bones under a thin layer of skin, with no flesh in between.
Backside introduced herself as Grandpa Ho’s daughter-in-law, and the two men as his sons. They did not stand up but said they were grateful that my mother had helped to look after their father. Now that he was terminally ill with throat cancer, they wished to take him to live with the family.
Grandpa Ho raised his wrinkled hand and pointed to a nylon bag on the writing desk. Backside took it to him. He touched it and pointed to my mother. Backside opened the bag and examined, with the two men, the thread books tied together with a stack of rice paper on top. They nodded among themselves. Backside said to my mother, ‘I think our father wishes to give these to you.’ Her breath was pungent—she must have just eaten raw shallots. The three of them were all looking at my mother but glancing out of the corners of their eyes at the big suitcases piled one on top of another next to the bed, covered by a chequered cloth.
My mother took the bag and said, ‘We have to go now.’ She bowed to the bed. ‘Goodbye, Teacher Ho.’
‘End …’ Grandpa Ho rasped like winter wind through a keyhole.
‘Endometriosis,’ I said.
Everyone laughed and Grandpa Ho closed his eyes.
On our way out, my mother stumbled on an ashtray, which must have upset her because she hated dirt. She remained sullen. I did not ask to slide on the ice, although we were no longer in a hurry. I watched my steps to avoid another fall.
That evening my father looked through the books and the notes; he did not comment on our visit.
My Father
My father travelled a lot when I was small. I had nightmares about him, whether I was asleep or awake. I saw the clothes hanging on the back of the door to the balcony and I thought it was him standing there, floating in the air, legless. Sometimes I woke up at night, listening to the sound of the clock ticking, and I thought it was him just returned home, chewing bones in the darkness. I was awake, but then I would wake again to find it all a dream. In those dreams I felt suffocated by the muscles tightening in my throat. I tried not to move, not to be noticed. If I lay still, we would be safe. My mother was deeply asleep, her white shoulders half exposed, defenceless against the moving shadows. I worried about her, yet I did not want to alert her to the danger or burden her with my fears. I waited in silence until the heavy thoughts weighed me back into sleep again.
When my father did return, he sometimes came to pick me up from the kindergarten and taught me traditional poetry on the way home.
He locked the cookies and dried fruits he brought back from Beijing in a cupboard recessed into the wall and gave us a little each day, so they lasted for a long time. He drank before dinner every day, with a packet of salted peanuts. We were often given a few peanuts each. My brother ate everything all in one go. My sister ate them slowly. I divided them into halves, then quarters, so one peanut became four peanuts, and seven became twenty-eight.
My father had four army friends from different parts of the country, with different accents. They took turns to host gatherings. When it was my father’s turn, he wrote down a menu of ten dishes for my mother to cook. We pulled the table next to the bed because we did not have enough chairs. After a few glasses of rice wine, they started to sing and laugh and tell stories about their army days.
When my father was managing the office administration of the provincial art gallery, he had a lot of young female colleagues. They came in different colours. The girl with a dimple came in green. Her hair was green like willow branches in early spring. The girl with a round face and smiling eyes came in pink. The perpetual flush on her cheeks reminded me of waterlilies. The girl with curly hair and freckles came in yellow. Her skin was translucent under the sun, as if made of ivory. They laughed like jingling bells, and as gallery guides they were trained to speak without the local accent. They came as a group, like a spring creek rushing over the dry bank, singing, jumping, taking things and dropping them wherever they liked. They visited our home often. I called them aunties and they called my mother aunty, and we were all confused about our generations.
Uncle Cheng
My mother said there were two types of horses—the haughty racing horses and the slow carriage horses. It was my choice which I wanted to be. Her choice was to be a racehorse, to compete, to be the best. When she had been small, her mother did not allow her to play cards, because when she lost, she bit her opponent.
I asked what if I were a slow horse but still wanted to compete. She said in that case I ought to start earlier. She taught me the concept of prevision. When I started school, I did three things at night: revision of what I’d learned before, homework, and prevision of what was to be taught the next day.
My mother told me about her grandparents and her parents, her five brothers, her sister, and her many cousins. Particularly she told me about Uncle Cheng, who had studied in Beijing and then St Petersburg and was now a prominent scientist in nuclear technology. When they were young, they used to skate, cycle and go to parks together. He rode a motorbike, and was a lightweight boxing champion in his university. As a serious photographer, he had his own darkroom at home. Once my mother went to a demonstration and it started to snow. He found her among a hundred thousand students at Tiananmen Square and brought her an army coat. My mother said Uncle Cheng had recommended I read a science magazine, Knowledge Is Power, so she subscribed for me.
I asked her where Uncle Cheng was and she said he was in the desert. Nuclear technology was dangerous and had to be tested in the middle of uninhabited land. I asked if we could visit him. She said he lived at an unspecified place, which meant his real address was disguised because it was a national secret. His letters were redirected via the government office.
My mother had a secret drawer on the left side of her writing desk. She told me that its contents would belong to me when she died. Because of that, I thought I was free to inspect it once in a while. When she was not looking and no-one else was at home, I would open the drawer and take out the chocolate box, which contained a letter. There was always one letter to my mother from the same address, but it was not always the same letter, as the stamps were different. When she received a letter, she would put it in the chocolate box. She would take the previous letter, cut it into small pieces and scatter the shreds in the canal on our way to the kindergarten. She said certain things were best buried in nature. Nevertheless, she always kept the last letter in the chocolate box in her secret drawer.
1981
In 1981 my mother was allocated to a newly set up birth-control institution. She left home at six o’clock each morning to catch the shuttle bus and fell asleep on the ninety-minute journey. My father had left the art gallery and the Peking Opera troupe, and gone back to teaching at the School of the Communist Party, where he stayed late into the evening to write articles or attend meetings. My brother was studying for university entrance exams for the third time. There were some discussions about whether he should join the army, but my mother dismissed the idea. My sister was preparing for senior high school entrance exams, and I for junior high school exams.
I had grown exceptionally tall.
I was in love with a new boy whose mother was a maths teacher at our school. She often punished him by standing him in a corner of the classroom. I felt sad, seeing his tears, but I could not help noticing how he deliberately kept his snot at the verge of dripping.
Soon I fell in love again, with a crippled boy who wore shiny shoes.
An anonymous blacklist entitled ‘The Emperor and his Concubine’ floated among the class, with the names of boys and girls paired up. Everyone was worried, curious to see others’ names, fearful of seeing their own. The teacher was furious. She stood in front of the class; her sharp eyes darted around and we lowered our heads in guilt.
The last semester started in March. I loved Chinese but did well in mathematics. I practised mathematics by solving all the questions in a blue exercise book that cost seventy-three cents and a yellow book that cost eighty-four cents. I often studied until eleven at night on the folded-up sewing machine, listening to my parents’ conversations, sometimes testing them with my questions, my feet playing with the pedal.
My brother and sister shared the small room. He often came home late, and she often had friends coming to visit.
My brother liked to slap the back of my head. I screamed, and fought back by kicking him on the shinbones. He hit me harder. I cried, I complained, but by then my parents had given up trying to discipline him. I wrote his name and derogatory words on the exterior walls of our villa, but it only made him laugh. On rare occasions he would hit my sister. She only cried and walked away without a word. She knew all his secrets.
One Sunday in early summer, my mother said she would take me to see a film.
It was a fine day. The sky was a light blue, and the trees and houses were bathed in warm sunshine. The swallows spread their wings and scissor tails, singing, rapidly ascending and descending, cutting their own song tracks.
We walked to the Workers-Peasants-Soldiers Cinema three kilometres from home. The spring flowers had withered, but the new buds had grown into a cheerful green. I collected willow leaves, put them between my thumbs, made a hollow compartment with my hands, and blew. It sounded like a high-pitched shriek or someone passing wind. But my mother did not laugh.
At the last block before the cinema, she started talking to me. ‘Do you remember I told you about Uncle Cheng?’
‘Yes, Mum. I like him.’
‘How do you like someone when you haven’t met him?’
‘You told me he’s like you.’ I threw the crumbled willow leaves into the air.
‘We’re going to meet with him today.’
‘What if Dad asks about the film?’
‘We’re going to see it together with Uncle Cheng.’ She took the lipstick from her bag and put it on. ‘Is this okay?’
I wiped off the bit outside the edge of her lip with my little finger. She hugged me.
I recognised Uncle Cheng from a distance. He looked younger than I thought. His pearly white coat stood out in the dust and haze of our polluted city. He looked up from his newspaper, saw us, smiled at me and rested his eyes on my mother. My mother gave me a quick look and instantly blushed.
‘So this is the favourite one. How old are you?’ Uncle Cheng asked. His hair was thick and neatly cut, with some silver shining through the black.
‘I’m nearly ten.’
‘She’s going to junior high school later this year. Working hard now.’
‘Your children would have to be excellent.’ Uncle Cheng rested his eyes on my mother again.
‘Look how slim you are. I’ve put on so much weight,’ my mother said.
‘Walking in the desert trims you down. If you walk with me …’
My mother’s nose turned red, the first sign of her tears.
‘Are we going to see Love on Lushan Mountain?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I’ve got the tickets.’ Uncle Cheng gave them to me to hold.
I had a last look at the large movie posters. As I turned my head, I saw my father on his bicycle, riding away. Before we left home, he had said he was going to a meeting. Could it be a man who looked like him, who happened to have a similar bicycle with the same green ropes tied onto the back seat?
>
We walked into the theatre and sat in our seats, my mother on my left, Uncle Cheng on my right. When the lights went out, I forgot all about my father. I was captivated by the beautiful setting of Lushan Mountain, the waterfalls, the flowers, and the two fresh-faced, youthful characters. I was excited and embarrassed when they kissed. I had seen kisses in Western films but never in a Chinese one.
The lights came on halfway through, while we waited for the second half of the film to arrive.
‘How old is your fiancée?’ my mother asked.
‘Are you not married?’ I was surprised.
‘Not yet, darling,’ Uncle Cheng said, gently patting my hand. A vertical line had formed between his eyebrows, like a cut on an otherwise perfect apple. He looked at my mother. ‘She’s in her twenties.’
Sitting in front of us were a couple and a teenage girl. The father’s hair was untidy and greasy; the collar of his white shirt had a ring of black dirt near the neck, and his grey sweater had fluff balls big and small all over it. They were sharing a hard-boiled egg.
‘What kind of accommodation have you been allocated?’
‘A three-bedroom apartment that comes with a driver and a maid.’
‘Have you had it furnished? I know it gets cold at night.’
‘It’s well insulated. They produce high-quality bricks in that area. The living conditions are not bad.’ Uncle Cheng sighed. ‘I brought you this.’ From his chest pocket he took out a crimson velvet pouch.
My mother opened it and inside was a jade bracelet.
‘This is a special type of jade called “As Green as Blue”. It reminds me of the lake we used to visit.’
My mother tried to put it on, but it was too small. ‘My hands have grown bigger. It’s the hot water for washing.’ She examined the flawless jade in her palm. ‘Maybe Xueqing should have it, when she grows up.’ She took hold of my hand.
