Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  That night when we were the last ones left “studying” in the classroom, he didn’t move closer to my seat like he usually did.

  “Are you upset?” I walked over to him, worried.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What did I do wrong? Is it because of my dress? Is it too tight?” I stepped closer. Of course he didn’t like seeing his girlfriend dressed so flashily in public. He was such a reserved person. I should have thought of this.

  He gave a noncommittal grunt in reply. I had hit a nerve.

  “Who bought you the dress?” he asked after a minute.

  I hesitated for a second. “My uncle,” I told him limply.

  “The man who always visits with your mother?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. I knew he was waiting for me to tell him more, but I just couldn’t open my mouth to tell him about my mother the “pussy-seller” and my father the “wife-seller.” I thought he wouldn’t love me as much if he knew about my shameful family.

  I looked at him desperately, afraid that I would lose him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t wear it again, I promise.” I put my arms around his neck and apologized repeatedly. He sighed and then he seized me by the waist and pulled me onto his lap.

  We kissed each other until his hesitant hand groped its way under the dress and touched my chest. “I looked it up in the dictionary,” he murmured. “In English they’re called ‘nipples.’”

  I wondered foggily why a guy would look that up. I was lying practically flat in his arms. His hand moved to my stomach and then paused. I saw his blushing face in the shadows of the window lattices, and his eyes were filled with eagerness, irresolution, and questions. I knew I would do anything for this man, the first person in my life to give me love. It was like a disease growing inside me that made me willing to give everything I had.

  I put his hand on my knee and gave him an encouraging look. When his hand reached where it wanted to go, I felt both of our bodies tremble. His fingers on my skin were like an electric current, and a feeling of pleasure instantly spread all over. All was quiet and still except for the crickets chirping in the flower terrace downstairs and the excited panting in the English classroom on the second floor.

  He unbuckled his belt and put my hand underneath his shorts on his flat stomach. I slowly slipped my hand down until I touched the center of his universe. I put my hand around it. It was hard yet smooth. It felt beautiful, just like the rest of him.

  He carefully moved a few chairs out of our way, spread a layer of newspapers on the floor, and put his coat over them. The cement still felt cold under the coat. When he lay down on top of me, I held his lean body tightly. He felt strong and warm and safe. I closed my eyes, telling myself that I would never ever regret this.

  He moved a few times on top of me, and then a waft of warm breath blew into my ear. “I don’t know how to do this.”

  I moved my arm awkwardly in the air. It hit the wall below the blackboard and came back to the floor with chalk dust all over it.

  “I think you need to support your body with your arms on the floor, and not entirely on me,” I suggested. I didn’t know anything about it either except what I’d seen when I was five and had woken up in our big bed to find my father moving on top of my mother. As soon as they noticed me, my father had giggled to my mother and then lifted the quilt over their bodies.

  He tried a few times unsuccessfully, until finally he turned over, exhausted and discouraged. “It looks easy in the movies. I don’t know how to do it. Forget it.”

  We lay still on the floor, staring at the flat tile ceiling in the dim moonlight. I wanted to tell him not to worry, but my mouth felt taped shut.

  The embarrassment of that night remained between us, though we never mentioned it. Chi became quieter, but he still dominated my world. The physical intimacy made me love him even more. We went to movies whenever we could afford it and made out the entire time. I wished that he would try to make love to me, but he never attempted it again.

  Gradually the differences between us surfaced, but I swallowed all my unhappy thoughts and tried my best to please him, naively thinking that the love between us would last for all eternity.

  “Do you think you can learn to speak Mandarin?” I asked a couple of months later, while we were walking down the street. I was sounding him out carefully. He was the only student in the class who refused to learn Mandarin and insisted on speaking his rustic local dialect. Mandarin was our national language. Teachers were required to know it. Without saying anything, he jerked his arm away from mine and stalked off ahead of me, angry.

  He didn’t like to study and missed classes all the time. He thought that no matter what, he would be assigned somewhere awful after graduation, so he did as little work as possible, like most of the students. I didn’t picture a different future for myself, but I was still a “good” student, obsessed with grades.

  “With a cigarette after a meal, I’ll be happy as a god,” he always sighed contently.

  “So you’ll be happy being a teacher your entire life?” I asked him one day.

  “I’m not ambitious like you. I’m just ordinary,” he snapped, displeased. I looked at him ardently and thought to myself that a man with such a beautiful face couldn’t be ordinary, no matter what he thought of himself.

  I thought he was unhappy just because he didn’t like college or was irritated with the hot weather. I was so headover-heels in love that I had never ever even considered the possibility of him wanting to break up with me. I didn’t see it coming at all, the humid Sunday afternoon when he asked me to meet him in the classroom. Cicadas were twittering in the poplar trees outside the classroom. After a long silence, he spat out, “Let’s end it like this.” I was shocked. Feeling like a knife was piercing my heart, I sat across the table and gawked at him, speechless, for a long time. His face looked thin and sallow, as if he hadn’t slept for days. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Why? Don’t you want me any more?” I felt like I had been dumped by the whole cruel world.

  “No reason.” He lowered his taut face.

  “You said you would love me forever.”

  “Feelings change.” He spoke lightly, but to me his words seemed heavier than a mountain. No, feelings can’t change, I thought. Your love for me can’t change. Can’t change. It just can’t.

  “Tell me if I did something wrong, please.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Are you falling in love with another girl? Is she pretty? Of course she’s prettier than me, isn’t she?”

  “No, I’m not. We’re just not right for each other. I won’t date for two years. I promise.”

  He sounded like a man who was just recovering from a serious illness.

  I felt like I was living in hell for next several days. When Jenny reminded me to eat, I followed her to the cafeteria like a robot. She had to carry my bowl, fill it with rice and vegetables, put in front of me, and order me to eat.

  But I didn’t. I just rambled nonsensically to her. “Why did he break up with me? What did I do wrong?” I clutched her arm. “I want him back. Do you think I can get him back? Tell me how I can get him back.”

  Jenny whisked rice into her mouth, looking at me sympathetically. After she finished chewing her last mouthful, she sighed. “Look, you need to eat, and then you can go get him back.”

  “Whatever, Tiger,” Fish interjected. “You should’ve dumped him anyway before he had the chance to do it to you. Now don’t cry. You go find a better boyfriend and let Chi cry.”

  I barely heard any of their words. For me, it was the end of the world.

  I still went to classes every day the week after the breakup, but Chi was never there. I sat through the classes silently, but on that Thursday during Listening Ability class I started to shake uncontrollably at my station while the earphones on my head played an excerpt from the BBC news. Jenny, sitting next to me, was frightened and whispered to me to go and rest; she wouldn’t put my
name on the absent list.

  I staggered to the deathly quiet dorm building. I paced the corridor on the first floor, staring at the unlatched door of the guys’ room, behind which I knew Chi must be hiding. Eventually I ran wildly upstairs to Room 207 and slammed the door behind me. I marched back and forth in the room like a mad soldier. I lifted the thermos and started to pour hot water into one of the aluminum cups on the table. Then I put it back down and squatted on the floor, sobbing to myself hoarsely. I knew I needed to do something to ease this pain, so enormous that I couldn’t handle it. I lifted the thermos again and poured the boiling water on to my wrist. Soon the skin turned red, and magically the roaring pain inside me started to vanish.

  There were bubbles all over my wrist when I sat down next to Fish in the cafeteria for lunch. I smiled with bloodshot eyes and said that I was so stupid for having burned myself while pouring water. She gave me a penetrating look and then she said casually while placing some rice in my bowl, “You burned yourself on purpose, didn’t you?”

  I forced an embarrassed smile to the concerned Room 207 girls sitting at the table. Then I concentrated on the rice bowl, not raising my face.

  I wrote a very long letter to Chi, recalling the happy memories we had shared and begging him to give us another chance because I really would die without him. I ended this last sentence with three exclamation points.

  The next day, I arranged to meet Chi that night, behind the cement moon gate next to the playground, where the gymnastic bars stood in the grass. All sorts of feelings welled up in my heart when I saw him. He looked surprisingly wan and his hair was a mess. So the breakup had not been easy on him either. Hope rose in my heart.

  He played with a small rock with the tip of his foot. I asked if he had read my letter. He nodded.

  After a long silence, I took a deep breath and asked him in a quivering voice, “Do you think we can have another chance?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said simply.

  I burst into sobs. “Why are you so heartless?” I shrieked.

  I had brought all the letters and pictures we had given each other, and now I tore them apart and hurled the pieces at him. He dropped his head and stood still in the moonlight, looking helpless.

  Finally, I realized that it was over.

  I will never love again, I swore to myself as I ran back to the dorm. Love was all lies and betrayal.

  For my remaining year at college, I lived like a shoddy actress, putting on a bad show for Chi, my only imagined audience. My sole goal was to prove to him that I could live very well without him and that in giving me up he had made the biggest mistake of his life. I hid the scorching pain inside myself and wore a happy face in front of people. I searched constantly for things to do, not allowing myself to be free for one minute.

  I bought a small blue violin, and every afternoon I biked to lessons, even though I didn’t know how to read music. I took Japanese lessons every night for three months and then in the next month forgot all the syllables I had learned. I joined the basketball team, even though all I could manage to do was push and shove people without any respect to the rules. I took dancing lessons, and I took the bus every weekend to Suzhou University with Fish, the only girl in our room who dared to dance with strangers and have fun. I would sit nervously on a bench in the big sweaty-smelling dance hall packed with people, praying some guy would ask me to dance with him, but at the end of the night I always realized that nobody could compare to Chi.

  I hung out with the boys from Suzhou University, pretending that I wanted to help their relatives with English or that I was there to learn kung fu, and I often found myself in their playground at the crack of dawn, flirting with some guy. Muddle-headed and driven by a relentless anger, I let a couple of lusty guys touch me, never paying attention until my underwear was pulled down to my knees.

  I failed the Moral Principles class. I had never gotten a score below 90 before. I couldn’t help grinning to myself. Did this mean that now I was a person without morals? Even if it did, so what? Good morals wouldn’t bring Chi back to me. Good morals couldn’t decide which school I would be assigned to the next summer. Good morals could not change my fate to be an English teacher working for minimum wage until the day I retired. I had been born to a peasant family without any powerful friends or relatives. I was doomed to be assigned to the most remote school with the worst academic reputation.

  Everyone in our English class dreamed of becoming a travel guide or a secretary or an interpreter in a joint-venture company instead of a teacher. I thought if I found a job like this, I wouldn’t have to become a teacher. This would be the best proof to Chi that he had been an idiot to have left me. At that point, I didn’t even care whether it was a governmental job with benefits or a job in the private sector that offered no guarantees at all.

  Graduation was only a few months away, so on afternoons after classes ended, I started to wander among the octagonal pavilions and tall pagodas in Suzhou’s ancient gardens, striking up conversations with tourists with blond hair and blue eyes. My broken and heavily accented English often scared away those foreigners with cameras hanging around their necks, but not always. Some tourists were nice and gladly spoke with me. I could never forget a kind old couple from California named Erica and Peter. Erica sat with me on the rocks facing the lotus flowers in a pond, and we talked for a long time. For many years afterward, no matter where I drifted, her letters from the other side of the Pacific Ocean would always reach me when I needed a kind word the most.

  On weekends, I trudged along by myself in the suburbs, holding the classifieds and knocking on the doors of any joint-venture company I could find. They all looked the same—spacious factory buildings, machines roaring, workers in uniforms pushing huge carts, and the human resource ladies in suits, with cold faces, telling me that they didn’t need any workers without a bachelor’s degree. I was graduating with an associate’s degree.

  Spring was a season of drizzles in Suzhou. When I dragged my feet out of those factory gates, my hair was always wet and the road in front of me was always muddy. When I got back to the dorm, I couldn’t always just collapse on my bed as I wished, because sometimes my mother would be sitting on it. She or Honor or both of them visited me once every month, a painful ritual. The happiness brought by the food and clothes she gave me quickly passed, and then for the next hour I’d sit next to her, listening to her babbling about my father’s stupidity. “He’s just like a bead on an abacus—never do anything unless you move it. And he still allows his mother, that old dying witch, to spread rumors about us. Sometimes I hate him so much that I just want to chop him up with a knife. . . .”

  I would stare at my mother’s tears quietly and imagine putting my hands around her neck and choking her just to get her to shut up. I realized that no matter how far away I got from the village, I would never be able to escape my mother’s crying and moaning, and I felt desperate at this realization. But I pressed down my agony and let her vent. As I grew older, it seemed that my mother had gradually begun treating me as a crutch. I didn’t want to hurt her by refusing this role, though God knows how hard it often was for me. She was the most difficult problem in the world. No matter how good I was at math, I couldn’t solve it. Sometimes I wished that I could just point my finger at her, my father, and Honor and magically turn them into three small, quiet clay figures.

  After she left, I’d look at the food resting on the table, duck my head under the covers, and cry.

  July 1993 arrived, the month of graduation. Everyone became moody, busy with packing, yelling at each other impatiently. Once in a while, you would hear a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend running and screeching in the halls.

  In the classroom, people passed around memento books in which you were supposed to leave your contact address, the most handsome signature you could write, and a few sentimental sentences. I signed every book mechanically, and occasionally picked the biggest blank space on the page and jotted down th
ings like “May you have a big and fat son very soon!” I felt like a bored movie star. I hadn’t bothered to pass around a memento book of my own. I thought it was all so superficial, until I saw Chi’s name on the cover of one blue book. Suddenly the pages felt burning-hot. I couldn’t believe he was so mellow and happy that he was passing around a stupid memento book while I was still tortured day and night by my unending love for him.

  I passed the book along without signing it. I was certain I would never get over him. I had dreamed many times that he had come back to me, saying he loved me, and I kept dreaming it for many years. Although his face gradually became blurry, he had become a secret buried in my heart, an icon carved into my bones.

  On the day I was scheduled to move out of the dorm, Honor and my mother came to Suzhou to try to solicit help from some potential backers to get me a decent job assignment. We squatted in the shadow of a tree, waiting for my Small Uncle. One of his former battle companions was a doctor in a big hospital in Suzhou who might be able to introduce us to some powerful people in the educational system. Small Uncle had promised my mother that he would come and help.

  But he never showed up. In the end, he had decided not to face the heat and the unpleasant task of begging people. The three of us squatted there for hours, and by the end of the day we were sunburned and looked like three red lobsters. Disappointed, we went back to the hamlet.

  Throughout August, Honor and I, bearing cases of popular nourishment drinks, visited all the teachers and clerks he knew in the Educational Bureau. Bowing and scraping, we grinned broadly at those reluctant stern faces and begged them to help to assign me to a good school in a good location. My smiles gradually became stiff as I realized that all our efforts were going to be for naught. Without a few stacks of money to give the top leaders in the Education Bureau, my fate was entirely at the mercy of others.